Ep. 111: "The Handjob-Industrial Complex"
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Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: How are you going?
Merlin: I'm impressed.
John: How come?
Merlin: I'm impressed.
Merlin: I'm impressed because you're a man who leaves the house in a vehicle and you go places and you do things.
Merlin: You spend your morning and your afternoon doing things and then you show up early for a podcast recording.
John: Isn't that something?
Merlin: How do you do it?
John: Not only that, but there was a truck fire on the interstate.
John: There are a lot of trucks on the interstate at two o'clock in the afternoon.
John: That seems to be high truck hour.
John: But there was a dump truck that rolled over and spilled diesel fuel all over the interstate and burned itself.
John: I mean, burned itself kind of completely up.
Merlin: Can I present a scenario where that would have never happened?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: If it had been on a train.
John: Thank you.
John: Thank you.
John: Although trains do sometimes crash and burn.
Merlin: Yeah, but they crash at scale.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's like dying on Christmas.
Merlin: You jam it all into one thing.
John: Yeah, well, and usually when a train crashes, it also has some tanks of liquid sulfuric acid or something, and they have to evacuate an entire town.
Merlin: Bread and circuses, that's what I see.
Merlin: You give them a spectacle.
John: I went downtown today and parked in a parking garage.
John: uh right at noon two three things i never do and uh although i guess at noon isn't a thing but i went downtown at noon that's the thing i try never to do and i parked in a parking garage so two things i never do and by the time i reached the seventh floor of the parking garage and had not found an empty spot i realized
John: Something, I guess, it never fully occurred to me, like, the dirty secret of cities that they are hiding all of these cars in these, like, car hives.
John: And this is the reason that in the morning and the afternoon there are these tens of thousands of cars that aren't normally on the roads.
John: Right.
John: But like everybody drives into town and they pack into these hives.
John: I don't know.
John: I was just driving through this parking garage and I was realizing like, oh, wow, this is really the problem.
John: This is astonishing that we think this is a good system.
John: Each one of these cars represents like one person making it from their house to their place, to their job.
John: Every one of these people is probably paying $30 a day to park here.
John: And it's just like this extraordinary waste of resources and people's time and energy and all this space they had to build to hold all these cars.
John: And just every aspect of it is a colossal, hilarious waste.
John: And, you know, because it's behind kind of a wall of, you know, like a, it's just packed in there in such a way that I, not just me, but we all walk through the city just kind of blissfully unaware that we are every day like loading these silos up.
Merlin: up and i mean i guess if you work downtown you're not unaware this is the this is the world you live in but right but it's it is like it's like a they live situation where like you just stop for a second and you look at it and you go this is crazy and it's always on the edge you notice that when a truck blows up right but like does anybody ever get to work like half an hour early and get the first space and go i feel refreshed
John: Well, and it's so ad hoc.
John: That's the amazing thing.
John: It's like, why is this the system?
John: Well, because every time there was a problem, somebody fixed the immediate problem by building a new on-ramp, by building a new parking garage.
John: At each step of the way, we solved the most immediate problem.
John: I have to go to work downtown, but my wife has to go to work four blocks from there.
John: Well, we got to get two cars.
John: Everybody is solving the problem right in front of themselves, and there's no collective problem solving.
John: There's no collective thinking in the system really at all.
Merlin: You've really gotten me thinking about that a lot in a way that's probably dangerous in the last few weeks talking about the systems and the grids.
Merlin: I totally agree with you because, again, I say it's like they live because all you really need, you put on the glasses and suddenly you can see what's really going on.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: I mean most of what's happening, if you really, really turbo weigh up, a lot of our jobs are probably useless.
Merlin: But even if they aren't useless or let's say they are useless, you can still probably do it mostly from your house.
John: a lot of it absolutely what i mean most people's jobs are like move this file into that file typing it's all typing right basically we're all we're just typing different things and i mean when you think about that i mean and this was the promise this was the promise of industrialization this was the promise of of technology was that we would be freed from all this meaningless labor and
John: If you go back 100 years and you imagine what they thought technology was going to provide, it was always that technology would provide leisure.
John: We were going to be living in an environmental ecotopia, right?
John: Where we would have to work one or two hours a day and the rest of the time we would be in pedal-powered dirigibles.
John: Right.
John: flying around from park to park.
Merlin: It would just be like learning languages and writing classical music mostly.
John: Yeah, thank you.
John: It would be like Spain under the Moors.
John: Pax Romana.
John: Everybody would speak six different languages.
John: The Jews would be getting along with the Zoroastrians.
John: It was like a perfect system.
John: And instead, what we have done, again, just because of this ad hoc
John: uh individualism is we've with all of the technology all we have done is create more and more anxiety and more and more work but but like busy work busy work busy work sing it sister and then you gotta send you gotta send an email about how you can't drive to someplace on time
John: Oh, my God.
John: I'm driving with one hand.
John: I'm texting with another.
John: I got to post a Facebook video of the burning truck, right?
John: So then I'm the problem.
John: You're not an animal.
John: Where's my parade?
John: I hear you.
Merlin: So, yeah, it's just insane.
Merlin: I'm not a historian, but there's an analogy people use for lots of different things, especially things like old computer code.
Merlin: And they refer to it as being like the city of Rome, where there's never going to be like a great day to just start over.
Merlin: Really, Manhattan is like this in a lot of ways.
Merlin: You just keep building.
Merlin: You have some system that barely, barely works at doing something we needed 50 years ago or 100 years ago, and you update that a little bit, and then you put some patches on it, and you hack on it a little bit, and you add a new lane, but it's still the same completely screwed up system, and there's never a good day to just start over and install pneumatic tubes, which is what we really need.
John: Well, we talked about this, I think, a long time ago in 1999 when my mom started getting all these phone calls from companies who were like, listen, we're still running the software that you wrote in 1968 and nobody knows how to fix it.
John: Right.
John: And we'll pay you any amount of money to come back and just let us and figure out how to insert a four...
John: four numeral date code because all of the banks are going to stop working and my mom was like there is no amount of money that would entice me back in like no and it turned out like it didn't all come to a screeching halt but
John: But the awareness I had at that time that so much of American industry was still running on patched-up 40-year-old Fortran code was, I mean, or COBOL or whatever, or machine-like, you know?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And that's why I think the way that you – at least I historically have heard that city of Rome metaphor applied most often to, no surprise here, the air traffic control system.
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
Merlin: Which, you know –
Merlin: Well, I mean, you know, I see this at my bank where when I go into my bank, if I need to get like a cashier's check or something, it looks like DOS that they're using on there.
John: Well, I know what I what I worry about or what not what I guess it's not a worry, but I look at that and then I think, OK, how is this a metaphor for my personal life?
John: Oh, brother.
John: I am ad hoc solving problems in my own life at every turn.
John: And if I look at the way I live and my goals and my dreams, what if I stripped away all of the infrastructure I think I've built and really imagine what do I want to do?
John: What would I do with my day if I had no...
John: if I had no a priori, uh, premise about how a day had to look even.
Merlin: So part of you saying kind of like, you know, there's all this stuff we have to do.
Merlin: That's just kind of the overhead of doing grownup stuff, which you could certainly, you know, call busy work stuff that feels like kind of a waste of time.
Merlin: Like if you could remove all of that friction, would you be able to make your own personal Pax Romano?
Merlin: Would you be able to like be, become a great man?
John: And this, I feel, is maybe the lie of...
John: modernity the idea that we are all philosopher kings the more leisure time people have the more it is revealed that we do not have boundless imaginations we do not know what to do with leisure because we are beasts of burden by construction we are meant to
John: we are meant to live nasty, brutish, and short lives because we are, well, we are pig monkeys.
John: As I've said before, like all the leisure in the world produces reality television or it produces a culture of gaming that at the surface of it, like, you know, I hate to ever go on the record and,
John: In any way, criticizing gaming, because my God, you get, I mean, you know, I got some angry letters about a podcast we did a couple of weeks ago where I said, I don't even remember what I said, but I said one charitable thing about China and it inflamed people.
Merlin: And the joke was that people get mad when you say even one nice thing about China.
John: Well, I think China, there are some people out there for whom China is a trigger word.
John: Whatever silo they're living in, they are convinced that China is the inheritor of every sort of fascist trope.
John: And so you can't say a nice thing about China because China!
John: Bad!
John: Chemtrails!
John: But boy, if you start to talk about gaming and say a bad thing about gaming, you get all this.
John: I mean, because the gamers have spent 40 years defending themselves against the PMRC or their moms and dads or whatever.
Merlin: Another kind of civil rights almost.
John: Yeah, everybody had a hard-on for gaming for so long that the gamers really have their hackles up, but also have their 25 lines of defense about how valid and valuable gaming is.
John: But in fact, it is games.
John: It is adult games.
John: It is like playing Twister, really.
John: And maybe it is an entire world and a virtual world and a fantastic environment to play in, but it's the holodeck.
John: And that's what we're doing with our acquired leisure.
John: That is the benefit.
John: That's how we're spending our savings, that we are mining the earth, stripping it bare and filling the skies full of smoke in order that we not have to do, admittedly, the difficult work of farming.
John: for ourselves yeah like pulling a hoe or whatever and and so we don't have to pull a hoe anymore
John: And we have the leisure now to put our headphones on and stare at a virtual space and hop around it with our virtual little man.
John: You're on your own on this one.
John: Our little man goes here, our little man goes there.
Merlin: But as long as we're shooting fish in a barrel, I will say also that... You're just mad that somebody's going to send you a really, really long...
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Merlin: But when you talk about the social media thing, you joked about having to take a video of a fire.
Merlin: I do think there is – I was talking to somebody the other day about Facebook and I always feel like I'm a little bit in danger of trying – of sounding like a nut, not because I don't do Facebook but because I have to remind people.
Merlin: I actually do have to remind people that I am one of the Hill people.
Merlin: And I'm not on Facebook.
Merlin: And I don't have that strong of an opinion about it because it's just something I don't do.
Merlin: I mean, I had a stronger opinion about it when I felt the pressure to have to do stuff with Facebook.
Merlin: But now that I am one of the Hill people, the pressure is not there.
Merlin: But I think all of that stuff, it does create a kind of real anxiety that it's almost like if you said to your dog, like, you need to relax.
Merlin: You should start LARPing.
Merlin: And they would go like, no, I'd really just rather go out and be nervous about who's the leader out on the streets right now because that's more in my nature.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But that same kind of pig monkey drive that would lead a dog not to go out and play D&D in the woods.
Merlin: You know, today, I think that you can find anxiety or social pressure in almost anything nowadays.
Merlin: And this is, to me, what makes the work of Rowdy Roddy Piper so poignant even today.
Merlin: I really do.
John: That's a hell of a movie.
John: It is a great movie.
John: And, you know, Robin Goldwasser's father plays a starring role in that film.
Merlin: What?
John: You're not hip to this?
Merlin: Did you tell me this?
Merlin: Is he the guy who fights, has a 10-minute fight scene with him?
Merlin: Was that him?
John: Goldie's dad is the guy.
John: He's Roddy Piper's guide to the new way of seeing.
John: It's his Morpheus.
John: We'll cover this.
John: We can cut all this out.
John: I would love to talk to her about that.
John: But I feel like anxiety is the glue that holds us all together now.
John: Anxiety is the...
John: is the thing that Don Draper figured out, sold us toothpaste.
John: Anxiety is the thing that the military industrial complex figured out, kept us pouring money into their black projects.
John: Anxiety is the thing that keeps us getting married to one another.
John: It's the glue that holds us together as a society.
John: And again, because every one of those things...
John: was everything, one of those things was a solution to a problem that was right in front of us.
John: And there was, you know, and I mean, the conspiracists want us to think that there's somebody or somebodies who have a big plan.
Mm-hmm.
John: But to whatever degree there is a system, it is a patchwork quilt of small, individuated, like, rubber patches where the tire kept blowing out.
Right.
John: And it's just like, okay, so now we're living in this world and the degree to which things work in concert with one another is largely...
John: either happenstance or it's just this thing was right next to that thing so we made the gears the same ratio but the two things the two things work you know but do they like we get five things working together and we think that we are really building something but does that little ball
John: fit into this, you know, the giant ball pit of other little fiefdoms?
John: Like, none of it does, really.
John: I think you're right.
Merlin: And when you think, I hate to put on my futurist hat, but, you know, one of the things that makes it
Merlin: So it makes it so difficult to try to figure out what's going to happen in the future because we have so much of what we know is based on the past and trying to fix – like I say, trying to fix a 50-year-old problem with something innovative that gets that thing fixed.
Merlin: Like I remember when I first heard that John Lennon had a record player in his Rolls Royce.
Merlin: That seemed like the coolest thing in the world.
Merlin: In retrospect, it seems very, very strange, certainly luxurious.
Merlin: But there's one thing of all – you think back to all of the –
Merlin: Novels and films, just all the popular media about what computers were going to mean to people.
Merlin: I mean as recently – I don't know if you saw like last night's Mad Men.
Merlin: But people have for many, many years wondered and worried about what parts of our lives computers are going to replace.
Merlin: And obviously in science fiction, things like what happens when they become too intelligent and so forth.
Merlin: The one part of that that still really resonates with me though is that as more things get automated, it does start to feel a little bit like a Woody Allen movie from the 70s or something.
Merlin: Like if I had to change – I had a charge on my mobile phone bill that was only removable by calling them.
Merlin: So there's some kinds of things you can add on the website.
Merlin: I recently – we haven't had our actual cable TV box, for example, connected to the modem for months, and I've been paying for this.
Merlin: And finally, I'm like, I'm an idiot.
Merlin: Why don't I just call them and do this?
Merlin: But in the case of my phone company, I had to call them and like sit through a pitch for getting home internet and why wouldn't I want this service?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And in the case of like, for example, with my cable company, I got to return the modem.
Merlin: I got to have a big discussion with them about this and why I'm not enjoying television and things like that.
Merlin: And in that case, in both of those cases, I got good people to talk to.
Merlin: But the one thing that still carries over from that fear of depersonalization, dehumanization, the computers and AI we're going to bring is the sense that I don't really – there's not really an effective place to turn for almost anything.
Merlin: Sort of to your thing about like if you find the person with the juice, they can help you out.
Merlin: But I had $100 charge every month on my phone bill and I had to call and like persuade them that this was something I didn't want to have anymore even though I haven't been out of the country in like a year.
Merlin: And in both of those cases, why didn't I call them?
Merlin: Why didn't I just call Comcast the first time it occurred to me that I wasn't watching TV and I was spending $20 a month I didn't eat or whatever it was?
Merlin: Why didn't I call $100 a month?
Merlin: That's asinine because I know I'm already dreading.
Merlin: That's the anxiety there.
Merlin: It's the dread of having to call and sit and find out how many minutes it is until their call will be important to them and, and, and so on and so forth.
Merlin: And I think that's still very real.
Merlin: There's still a lot of self editing, self censorship along the lines of, if you like big brother, we're like that camera doesn't even need to be on all the time.
Merlin: I will create all the anxiety needed by my fear of having to interact with that system, having to call about something broken that like, I don't even know if that's now I'm in Brazil and I'm worried that Bob Hoskins is going to come in there and make it worse.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, they create a mental landscape where you pick up the phone, you are going to then enter into a virtual world.
John: Their branded experience environment.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Where you cannot see the horizon and you're walking and you hear your voice echoing and you're like, hello?
Merlin: It's like Las Vegas.
Merlin: It's like a casino without drinks.
Merlin: It's just in this room with no windows and clocks that you can't get out of.
John: Right, and you're hearing ticking, but there's also some distant music playing.
John: You're navigating around.
John: It's kind of foggy in there.
John: You're navigating around all these little minor obstacles, and there's no exit door, or you see an exit door, but it just disappears in the fog.
John: And I don't think there was any brain trust that envisioned that as a solution to their customer service issues.
John: I think they just happened upon it.
John: Like, wow, look at this.
John: We only have five operators and there are 50 people waiting to be helped.
John: And like 45 of them will just sit there forever.
John: So, wow, that's...
Merlin: But it is like a video game.
Merlin: What you're describing is like a video game though in that sense that like I'm not that good at video games and I know I'm not.
Merlin: And I know that when I get into that system, there's a chance that I will hit the wrong button and I will end up somewhere where I can't get out and the call will disconnect and I'll have to start over and I'll have to dial and wait and all that.
Merlin: And I mean I might be alone.
Merlin: I might be the only lunatic in the world that sits around in fear of having to make that call.
Merlin: But I am in fear of that call and I hate getting to the point where I can hit two or do nothing.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Well, and as I'm sitting here thinking, I'm realizing this is what was so brilliant about the set design of Blade Runner and Star Wars both.
John: Because both of those... If you think about the Millennium Falcon and the way the Millennium Falcon is designed, it's built in such a way that you see...
John: You see that it has evolved from earlier ships to solve problems.
John: Like, the Millennium Falcon is not an elegant design.
John: It is a design, it's an ad hoc design.
John: And over time, you can kind of imagine the evolution of a freighter, of a spaceship, right?
John: And this is what they came up with.
John: Like the Death Star is basically just when you get in close to it, it's a thousand little condos.
John: You know, it's like a thousand little townhouses and condos and bullshit little towers.
Merlin: It basically looks like Daily City in space.
John: Yeah, because every single different minor administrator in the Imperial system had his own requirements for what the building standard of his little quadrant was.
John: And so the Death Star at a distance looks like a globe, but when you get in close, it's just this pimply little ball.
John: And the same is true of Blade Runner.
John: You get the feeling that...
John: those floating police cars or whatever are, are just, it's just what happened when you were married to the idea of what a car looked like, but then you put, but then you had like sort of minor hover craft technology.
John: And rather than build a new, a completely new thing, you just built a kind of car looking thing that also could hover.
John: And that, so those, those set designs were so convincing and so much like, uh,
John: They still resonate with us because it's like, yeah, that is kind of how it would go, isn't it?
John: It's not like we're ever really going to build something new.
John: We're just going to keep building.
John: Like, why does the Tesla look like a Lotus?
Yeah.
John: Well, because it is a Lotus.
John: And the new Tesla is like a fat Lotus.
John: And the next one will be, you know, will be just like something globbed on to the last thing.
John: And why the human imagination... I mean, it's not that our imaginations are constrained.
John: It's that you walk into the room and you're like, I've got it!
John: And the first five people you talk to are like, well...
John: Boy, to build that would be a real investment.
John: Shouldn't we just, you know, what if we just took the old trains and we painted them gray and we called it Amtrak?
John: What about that?
John: I mean, that'd be a lot cheaper than doing the thing that you're talking about, like redesigning the system.
John: Like, let's just keep the old thing.
Merlin: I watched Blade Runner again last week.
Merlin: Why wouldn't you?
Merlin: It's just extraordinary.
John: If anybody is listening to this podcast and hasn't watched Blade Runner in the last month and a half, I don't know what the hell I'm talking to.
Merlin: It's one of those movies that ends up being my Snap to Grid movie.
Merlin: It's just what I end up watching sometimes.
Merlin: I've seen it a bunch of times, but there's little details.
Merlin: When Deckard...
Merlin: call Sean Young from the bar on the video phone.
Merlin: And it's got graffiti on it.
Merlin: It's got graffiti on it.
Merlin: It looks like that's exactly what that would look like.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And then, of course, it's really expensive.
Merlin: It was like a dollar or something for the call.
Merlin: But they were so far ahead of their time.
Merlin: And that's what makes, like you say, that's what makes so much of that stuff from, I guess, for most of us, Star Wars on, is that there's a built-in brokenness to all of it, all the way down to the Death Star having this...
Merlin: vulnerability.
Merlin: But let me ask you this.
Merlin: Let me pivot.
Merlin: So the whole movie starts out with the nexuses.
Merlin: They've gotten too smart and they're killers and now we can't have them on the planet anymore.
Merlin: But Tyrell's still making nexuses.
Merlin: We got a lot of work to do out in space.
Merlin: And the off-world system.
John: Yeah, we're colonizing all these other little places.
John: We're out by the Tannhauser Gate.
John: We got a lot of work to do out there.
John: And that's the thing.
John: And what astonishes me, honestly, is that we still have not normalized the concept of a robot handjob machine.
LAUGHTER
John: Like how far, how much further do we have to progress as a society?
Merlin: Talk about a hole in the market.
John: My goodness.
John: Before robot hand job machine is just a normal thing that you buy at the Sears.
John: Because that should be like a toaster oven.
Merlin: It should be the kind of thing where for $40, you can get a pretty serviceable robot hand job machine.
John: All across America.
John: And I'm not saying the other countries of the world, because I know technologically a lot of them have a lot of catching up to do.
John: They are still burning peat to heat their homes.
John: But in America and France and Germany and England...
John: Think about the wasted effort, the wasted man hours going into... Person hours.
John: I'm sorry, person hours going into either administering hand jobs to other people or all the self hand jobbing.
Merlin: Yeah, and the nice thing about a handjob, a handjob is something that is often given and received with glee and delight.
Merlin: It's like a sweet surprise that comes up, and it's a nice thing.
Merlin: But you shouldn't have to depend on it from other people.
Merlin: To me, it's like a bidet.
Merlin: It would be nice to – I guess what I'm saying is I want to still be able to do what I do in the bathroom without there being a bidet there.
Merlin: In that case, you should have a robot that could stand in in your stead.
John: People right now, all around the world, are making very questionable decisions in order to try and secure for themselves or their loved ones a handjob.
John: And those decisions could be... A lot of busy work.
John: A lot of busy work.
John: That's right.
John: Completely ameliorated by what would... I mean, and I think part of the problem is we always imagine that the technology we're striving for is a perfect robot sex partner that does not have an uncanny valley, so to speak.
John: But in fact, pretty ambitious, John, you know, think about the technology that's good.
John: I mean, they're going to have to be a lot of cylinders firing together or in sync to build a perfect sex partner robot.
John: But a handjob, I mean, and, you know, a Madam Butterfly is already available that you can wear under your garments.
John: Yeah.
John: my handjob parade where's my fucking madam butterfly and i'm not talking about a fleshlight no there's something really undignified about it's so undignified come on yeah i'm not i'm not some guy in a white van like parked in front of rick's with a fleshlight going like i want it to be normalized so that it's like a vacuum cleaner it's like a it's a household appliance on christmas morning
John: Like, what do you get dad for Christmas?
John: Uh, tie?
John: No.
Merlin: I could see mom popping for a pretty nice robot handjob machine.
John: Yeah, you get him a Whirlpool handjob.
Merlin: Think about the time that opens up for her.
John: And, you know, when you're really thinking systemically...
John: Has anyone really thought about the multi-uses of, like, of spooge?
John: Hmm.
John: Jesus.
John: Like, let's say... I'm going to guess no.
John: Yeah, I'm sure somebody's thought about it.
John: But let's say, like, is it a good plant food?
John: Nobody's tested it, right?
John: I mean, we know that plants love electrolytes.
Merlin: Hmm.
John: That's what a plant needs.
John: Think about the nutrients in jizz.
Merlin: Yes, and right now it's all just being sloughed away in shame.
John: It's going down the toilets.
Merlin: Putting our lantern under a bushel basket.
John: Thank you.
John: That's right.
John: And we are asking our sewage treatment plants to process what is probably like 80 gallons of jizz a day.
Okay.
John: And we don't even recognize that's what it is because it's just in there with all the poo and stuff.
John: But that is just like potentially high protein nutrient.
John: We could be feeding our ferrets with it.
John: Think about what a ferret would do if you put a little bowl of jizz in front of him.
John: He would gobble it down.
Sweet Jesus.
John: So what I'm saying is we need to start to think systemically.
Merlin: I like the scope of the robot handjob machine.
John: And robot handjob machine and jizz reprocessor.
Merlin: which is like baby steps john but yeah you're right so there would be some kind of you know what oh my god um that's a really compelling idea but you know here's the other thing though is you think about most of the sex stuff is obviously designed with like pervy porno guys in mind and but like what is the robot handjob machine for a gentleman who's not ashamed to have one let me ask you this how many people like lock their bong up at night right they're not ashamed they got sitting on the goddamn coffee table
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It's like, oh, welcome to my home.
John: And there's my bong.
John: It's part of my accoutrement.
Merlin: And it's certainly, it's a little bit outside of the norm as it currently exists, but that's changing every day, right?
John: People are much more acceptable now to have a bong and much more acceptable for people to talk about
John: to talk, in fact, ad nauseum about their sexual proclivities, if those sexual proclivities are, if they identify those proclivities as part of their identity, as part of their political identity.
John: But what is shared more than masturbation?
John: It is the thing that unites us as a people.
John: That and anxiety.
John: Masturbation and anxiety, and my God, think about the masturbation anxiety.
Yeah.
John: Think about what an engine of progress or dubious engine of progress masturbation anxiety is.
Merlin: You've got me thinking.
Merlin: You're talking about the grids and the systems.
Merlin: I wonder if the theoretical...
Merlin: handjob economy has a lot to do with why things are the way they are, why there is so much busy work.
Merlin: Because you think about, for example, let's just say nothing against bars, nothing against alcohol.
Merlin: I bet you the alcohol industry would not be super into the idea of wide-scale adoption of a robot handjob machine.
Merlin: Because, right, somebody's going to be buying dessert because you never know what's in the future.
John: Why would you even go to a bar if you didn't have to?
John: And the only reason you go to a bar is maybe you're going to get or give a handjob at some point.
John: You're going to get a little drunk.
John: It's not convenient.
John: It's going to seem like a good idea.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, there's layers and layers to all of this, John.
Merlin: So many layers.
John: Age, Christ.
John: And so what we would have to do, though, of course, is you'd have to have some kind of... You wouldn't want to...
John: Get into a situation where people could have satisfying handjobs anytime they wanted.
John: Because how much of our culture is only... How much are we trying to solve the climate change problem that we have created?
John: only because of the promise of a certain number of hand jobs as a result of the work we're doing right like if that ends up being one of our prime motivators it drives the economy and we just end up and we put you know we we solve that problem we get we we short circuit the the motor of progress we've already we've created a problem we've created the pro uh we've created let's say the the pollution economy
John: And now if we just give ourselves all the handjobs we want, why solve it?
John: We're going to choke on our own smog.
John: Choke on our own smog.
John: Or feed it to our ferrets.
John: And while our ferrets grow larger and stronger, on a diet of pure jizz.
John: We need to figure out a way to portion out the handjobs, and then it becomes a question of who's in charge.
John: Who's in charge of who gets access to a handjob machine?
Merlin: Okay, who jobs the jobbers?
Merlin: So you're saying it should be – like you wouldn't want it to be like an aspirin.
Merlin: It shouldn't be like a handjob pill.
Merlin: Like it shouldn't be that easy?
Merlin: Is that what you're saying?
John: Maybe it would be like one of those breathalyzers that you have to use to start your car.
John: Just make sure you breathe into the right end.
John: You breathe into the tube and some of that hot breath is collected to add to someone else's hand job.
Merlin: You're the real futurist, John.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: You are not afraid to go big picture.
Merlin: Why waste the hot breath?
Merlin: I see a theme.
Merlin: I see a theme here, though, that you – it seems like it's – I don't think of you as foremost as an environmentalist, but you're really looking at the biome.
Merlin: You're looking at the big picture of where all this stuff goes, right?
Merlin: It's kind of a big part of it.
Merlin: It seems to me like you're saying we're throwing pennies down our toilet all day long.
Merlin: We should be putting these into some kind of a sperm bank.
John: It's absolutely right.
John: It seems to me crazy, and I think the more conventional way of looking at this is you drive through the town and you look up, especially 6 o'clock at night in the wintertime, you look up through the big plate glass windows at the hundreds and hundreds of people on exercise bikes, all with headphones on, all just plowing away.
John: just burning energy and and you know we we we bioengineered the corn that went into their high fructose corn syrup lunches and now here they are on their bikes like like screwing away those are electric those are electric machines they're drawing electricity in order to have people generate electricity that goes nowhere
John: And the idea that we have not already, I mean, we identified this problem a long time ago, but we have not actually just gone in as a human race.
John: No innovator has come along and said, look, every exercise bike from here on out has to add energy to the grid.
John: rather than take it like it's just a no-brainer why are we not putting all these exercise machines why are we not developing passive resistance as a technology used in exercise and every single gym in the country should be producing admittedly a small amount of energy but still energy like the the food that we are giving to these
John: These human agents, these like automatons, these human beings that we have paid to sit in front of a computer all day and now to sit in front of a computer and move virtual paper around.
John: Now, in order to even feel alive and feel like human beings, they need to pretend they are pulling a plow.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: We pay them to sit very still.
John: Yeah.
John: Now, why are we not trying to harvest that energy?
John: Why not just go the whole hog and just recognize that it is essentially a kind of matrix that...
John: where human beings are an extremely inefficient way of converting corn energy into electricity.
John: Into fake paper energy.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, you could just burn corn and probably harvest more energy than you're going to get from feeding corn to pig monkeys.
Merlin: To somebody making a floppy bird knockoff.
John: Yeah.
John: And then having them sit in an air on chair all day.
John: And then at the end of the day, telling them to climb virtual stairs while a little video screen, you know, while they're watching like Fox news.
John: Right.
John: Why, why should we not in that, in that entire process also have a tube connected to their penis where we are harvesting their, we're like collecting their sweat and we're, we're feeding that to, to some other like helpful rodents.
Merlin: uh-huh we have i mean why are we not working as why is this not a symbiosis yeah there's a there's a lot of corn being raised for dicey reasons for sure jesus h christ there is uh it's just too much goddamn corn and you know and the other thing is i'm thinking now about like when i i remember first time i got a watch that winds itself as you walk around my watch winds itself i don't drive one of those shifter watches
John: No, no, you got an automatic.
John: I watch wines itself.
Merlin: Or like the way a Prius works.
Merlin: Isn't part of a Prius, like when you hit the brakes, it like adds energy to the battery?
John: Yeah, rather than just, rather than convert the... And it's just ejaculating all of that wonderful energy all over the road.
John: Rather than convert it into heat, which you then have to dissipate, it is trying to convert it into energy through a generator.
Merlin: It sounds like there are – I mean once the vision is in place, it seems like it's mostly about – there's several different sort of arms, if you like, of the technology that have to go into place here.
Merlin: Obviously, yes, we need people working on a rapidly improving robot handjob machine.
Merlin: But also we really do need to look into what's being thrown away, what could be made for it, what could be replaced with it.
John: That's right.
John: Think about a train, right?
John: If you think about force equals mass times acceleration, right?
John: So if a
John: If a feather hits you at 50 miles an hour, it doesn't hurt.
John: But if a train hits you at 50 miles an hour, boy, it does.
John: And that's like one of the basic understandings that we have, right, as people.
John: But we're not seeing the other side of that equation.
John: If you think about what it takes to stop a fully loaded freight train, the amount of energy it took to get that train going, and then we have to burn off that energy to stop that train.
John: And there is no...
John: locomotive in america no train in america that has just an extra car in a in a hundred car train an extra car whose job it is to collect that energy as we're breaking the train which we have to do every freaking day we have to break these trains we have to you know they're coming down out of the mountains and it's an it's one of the primary
John: It's one of the primary problems that train people have to solve.
John: This train is going to come down this mountain and it has so much mass behind it to keep this train from just breaking loose and becoming a wild train and crashing into the city.
John: Like...
John: It's one of the big technologies of being trained people, right?
John: We have to keep the train from going out of control.
John: But nobody is saying, why are we not harvesting that energy?
John: There's all this energy.
John: We're just burning off.
John: And it would be...
John: I'm no engineer.
John: I am a computer science professor, but I'm no engineer.
John: But it would not be that big of a leap to design the next gen of trains where as they break, they're converting that energy into electricity.
John: And, you know, then what do you do with that?
John: What do you do with that electricity?
John: Well...
John: Well, I mean, if we were doing this... And that will end up being an increment of economic thinking.
John: Like, this locomotive, our brand new locomotive...
Merlin: conserves enough energy to power 200 000 handjob machines i used to think about in terms of movies every time like uh in my like post-college years every time i think about spending money on something i'd go hmm forty dollars that's like four movies right and you're saying this becomes the coin of the realm it's like five thousand dollars is one homeowner monetary unit
John: an hmu i like to call it when i moved into my house i was like i need to replace the roof on the barn and somebody said oh that'll cost about five thousand dollars and then i said boy i need to fix the you know i need to fix the furnace oh that'll cost five thousand dollars and after i lived here about a year i realized everything costs five thousand dollars that's insane and so what what you end up doing is you end up you end up
John: Looking at home improvement projects, how many HMUs is it going to be?
John: If we remodel the guest room, that's four HMUs.
John: If you want to redo a kitchen, you're looking at five to six HMUs.
John: If you want to just put a new roof on the house, probably one to two HMUs.
Merlin: Really?
John: Yeah.
John: That's extraordinary.
John: HMUs are just a thing that you have to factor into owning a home.
John: You can buy your house and you can live in it for five to ten years and then shit's going to start breaking.
John: And when it does, you are going to learn that the man with the clipboard comes to the house and he's going to...
John: You might get your gutters replaced for half of an HMU, 0.5 HMUs.
John: But forget about anybody coming to look at your pipes or your basic infrastructure of the house for less than...
John: Less than about 0.5 to 1 HMU.
Merlin: Do you have a thought on high-density housing?
Merlin: Do I?
Merlin: I ask because I learned some, not tragic news, but bummer news last week.
Merlin: I know I don't need to ask you this.
Merlin: We've been to flax, right?
Merlin: A couple times.
Merlin: They've got to move.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: Something like 23,000 square foot housing.
Merlin: square feet of art supplies and incredibly helpful people.
Merlin: They got to move because they're going to put some condos in there.
Merlin: And the thing is, the city really, really, really needs the space.
John: That's one of those locations where when you realize that
John: That prime space is being taken up with little wood human models.
Merlin: That's kind of their canonical item, I think.
Merlin: It's literally on the sign outside.
Merlin: Little sketcher dolls or whatever those things are called.
Merlin: Where else am I going to go for precisely the pen that I want?
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: Now you're going to have to get in the car and go out to...
John: go out to Sausalito.
John: Well, I mean, this is the thing that we've seen here in King County in Seattle.
John: If you don't want all the surrounding farms to be turned into tract housing, you have to submit to the fact that they're going to redevelop your city in such a way where they tear down nice old churches and they tear down...
John: What the conventional wisdom right now considers to be inefficient old Victorian housing or one-story retail, and they put in... I-O-V-H, I call it.
Merlin: I-O-V-H.
John: Inefficient old Victorian housing.
John: LAUGHTER
John: I-O-V-H, yeah.
John: They tear that shit down.
John: Each one's about 20,000 HMUs.
John: And they construct these new buildings which are quote-unquote green.
John: And about half of the construction material is actually blown in a hose.
John: They build some galvanized tin superstructure to hold their blown-in newspaper.
Yeah.
Merlin: As they tear out 150-year-old solid boards.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Homes made out of old-growth fur, they're just ripping it down and shipping it off to a landfill so they can build this green housing.
John: And then you're living in a habit trail.
Merlin: I think that's what these are going to be.
Merlin: The reason I mentioned that, I need to look at that article again, but I think these are going to be those home of the future type condos that's like living in an RV.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You know the thing they're doing now where you can get like – it's kind of been a – at least in the paper and stuff, they've talked a lot lately about San Francisco and a future where we might have more and more like 300 square foot apartments.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Their ideal situation is that every new housing is just like turned – it's just something out of the Tokyo airport where you put –
Merlin: There's room for your fixie and your handjob machine.
John: That's about it.
John: You put 400 yen into a slot.
John: A little tube opens.
John: It's like a torpedo tube.
John: You climb in there face down.
John: Your penis just naturally goes into the handjob slot.
John: And then there's like a screen that's playing you anime videos, like manga videos of like rabbits with vaginas dancing for you.
John: And all your functions are naturally, the tube goes right up your butt.
Merlin: They're so far ahead of us.
John: Corn effluvient.
John: The problem is, of course, that... Okay, here's an inefficient Victorian housing unit.
John: Right.
John: And the prospect of shared housing where each room in that house would be someone's apartment and they would pay, you know, it'd be it's the classic sort of college shared house.
John: Well, that's the old way of living.
John: Right.
John: That's the way that house was designed originally because the reason it has so many bedrooms is that grandma lived with you and your spinster aunt lived there and your teched brother-in-law lived there.
John: And all these people were living together in the house.
John: And then for many years, it was just like a hippie flop house or people were sharing these rooms.
John: But now the prospect of sharing a kitchen with strangers or sharing even a common area with strangers,
John: fills us with anxiety and we would much rather have a smaller and more antiseptic living environment where we can go close our door be away from other people no one you know in a way we are becoming a culture and i never thought i would say this but like where introversion is is setting the standard for
John: for the way we build and think about our space in a sense that like just in my own life just in my own adult life 20 years ago and it wasn't just because I was young
John: But, like, what did you do on a Saturday night?
John: If you weren't going to a rock show, you were going to some alternative theater or, like, the... Playing your baby grand piano.
John: The alternatives were all public.
John: It was... If you weren't... Or social.
John: Social.
John: Even if you weren't... Even if you were somebody who was very, like, solitary...
John: Without, I mean, you could stay alone in your apartment, but even the most solitary person needs some kind of interaction.
John: And you had to get that in the public sphere.
John: You had to go to an event or at least go out and wander around.
John: And in the last 20 years, all of our innovation has happened in the sphere of allowing people to interact with other people without going out.
John: That's interesting.
John: And so...
Merlin: So why would you have an eight-room house?
Merlin: In a way, it's almost like housing does for housing – it's like it's doing for housing what the cloud does for data, where we don't have to have our own hard drive sitting around.
Merlin: We don't need a place to put our grand piano effectively.
Merlin: If you're going to mostly be – if you're going to be working at Twitter for 16 hours a day, pop into Doc's Clock for two hours, and then ride back to your pod, why would you need all of that stuff?
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And increasingly, like, what do you need in your house?
John: You need a sink.
John: You need a shower.
John: Lots of power outlets.
John: Lots of power outlets.
John: Nobody takes a bath anymore.
John: You just need a kind of, like, we don't even really need to shower.
John: It could just be compressed air.
John: uh you know that just blows the dirt off of you and then you have a microwave and you have one sort of heating element that that convects your pot so that it boils some water for your ramen screen for seamless.com and and uh and you need a poop shoot and and for now at least
John: You need a box of Kleenex for your jizz because nobody has figured out a way to recycle that.
Merlin: If they're going to knock down flax in order to put up tiny condos, I hope there's going to be some jizz apertures.
John: Well, there won't be because you and I do not have the widespread agency yet to be affecting zoning.
John: We're touching people, but only a few at a time.
John: Yeah.
John: And I feel like...
John: I don't necessarily think that housing people in pods is, is the wrong direction.
John: But again, I mean, and I, and, and I will be the last guy to reference the matrix movies over and over and over.
John: You sure?
John: But, but like those little, those little gel filled, like, it's, it's basically, it's like a human ramekin.
Yeah.
Merlin: You're sitting there like a dessert product.
John: Right.
John: And you are unaware of the outside world.
John: You're unaware that your world isn't the world you perceive it to be.
John: It's just a little soap dish that keeps you alive.
John: As you generate energy for the robots.
John: As you generate energy for the robots.
John: And, I mean, it's amazingly prescient when you start to imagine that the next iteration of our modern world is a lot closer to the first step toward that eventuality than it is a step in a different direction.
John: Right.
John: Sure, put me in a smaller apartment and put my virtual headset on and give me a sex friend.
John: And these super ferrets that have become sort of self-aware because they're eating this high-nutrition food, the super ferrets are basically performing the role of helper monkeys.
Merlin: Oh, that's terrific.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They could turn pages for you.
Merlin: They could plug in your walking stairs.
John: Yeah, they have a natural affinity for going up high, and they want to go up there and reach stuff for you.
John: Who wants a treat?
John: Yeah, get up there.
John: Hey, Ferret buddy, if you don't bring me down my Cocoa Krispies, I'm not going to give you your little nutritive pearl jam.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Oh, goodness.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: It takes a village.
Merlin: Pearl Jam.
Merlin: Is that where that comes from?
John: I figured that was a little on the nose, but is that the... You know, they claim that it's named after Grandma Pearl's jam.
Merlin: I heard it was a drawing from John Lennon's son.
Merlin: There was Lucy in the sky.
Merlin: So, hmm.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You got 10CC, you got Steely Dan, Super Ferrets.
John: A lot of rock sex crossover.
Mm-hmm.
John: I mean, I'm feeling it.
John: I'm feeling it all the time in my own life.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Well, it's just... If you're filling the poll to make a dick joke in your band name?
John: I just, I feel like as you get to, as you get, as you arrive at a certain station in life,
John: I was watching this documentary the other day where George Hamilton appears in the documentary.
Merlin: John Milius?
John: I was watching that John Milius documentary.
Merlin: Wasn't that a hell of a thing?
John: That was an extraordinary documentary.
Merlin: I did not know... I didn't either.
Merlin: ...about what happened.
Merlin: I knew he was a little bit unusual.
Merlin: I didn't know he had that many photos of himself taken in uniforms with guns.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: But I didn't know what happened to him.
Merlin: That's so sad.
John: Well...
John: i mean certainly the stroke is sad but but the uh spoilers but the uh certainly the stroke is sad like i i i was not aware that he made red dawn i didn't know he did conan i made a reference to red dawn the other day because i feel like the i feel like the logic of red dawn
John: made so much sense to me as a teenager like somebody in the documentary there's some like you know do-gooder uh this whole segment about all the scare segments about what red dawn means about america in the 80s and some guy says like the most violent the most violent movie ever made they say only only a teenager would watch this movie and then he turns to the camera he's like only a dumb teenager and i was like excuse me sir i was that teenager and
John: You tested very well.
John: And Red Dawn, you know, Red Dawn was a movie that the plot of Red Dawn had occurred to us all for 15 years.
John: You couldn't have grown up during the Cold War without imagining because we all saw the day after.
John: And we'd been in the day after was was pandering to an idea that we'd already had a million times.
John: Like if if we basically was apocalypse porn.
John: Yeah, if nuclear war is inevitable, then your options are either you are vaporized in the first instance and have no awareness of it, or you are chemically poisoned and die a gruesome death in a burned out... Yeah, basically looking like a non-player character in a terrible D&D campaign.
John: Right.
John: Or your third option is somehow you survive it, either because you live way out in Montana or because you are a mutant and you are immune to radiation or the radiation only makes you stronger or something.
John: They didn't explore that fully.
John: But of the three options, let's say you're a 13-year-old.
John: Here are your three options.
John: Either you are vaporized instantly and you don't know anything, or you get sick and die in short order, or maybe you become a mutant rebel leader.
John: Which idea are you going to spend more time thinking about?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: And so, I mean, but realizing now that Red Dawn, that the logic of Red Dawn is powering our whole generation.
John: We no longer have a Soviet threat.
John: People are able to insert whatever threat, whatever the threat du jour is into that function machine of like, here's my Red Dawn function machine.
John: I don't care what...
John: The reason is that I end up having to move out to the grid and defend my land, and I'll put a new thing in there as suits, but what my fantasy is is that some New World Order, some big overarching power...
John: comes after me and i have to king of the sewer dwelling morlocks yeah right i i i'm king of the mole men or the or the like country people or whatever and we fight a we fight a war of resistance like it's fascinating i mean i wonder i wonder how much my own fantasy life is still locked in a red dawn
Merlin: John, you can't tell people today about the 80s because it's so frankly unbelievable.
Merlin: Something we've talked about probably two or three times that I hear people talk about this and everybody sloughs this off like it wasn't a real thing.
Merlin: But the absolute obsession that everything was about Satanism for a while was it was everywhere, whether that was D&D or whether that was Judas Priest or whatever it was.
Merlin: But there were people on TV shows that my grandmother watched that sat there and played records backwards because they thought it was really telling.
John: Do you remember when every daycare in the country was actually a Satanist sex ring?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And they were like little old ladies were raping our babies.
Merlin: That one story is so chilling about the mother and the son at that place, that famous case.
Merlin: Absolutely chilling, but it's another one of these hysterias where every once in a while the village has to just completely freak out about the other and then just insert name of other here.
John: Whatever happened to Satanists?
John: I imagine there are more Satanists... I mean, just going on the number of people I see wearing pentagram necklaces at Comic-Cons?
Merlin: I think irony has been hard on Satanists.
Merlin: Satanism is... It's not very hip.
Merlin: I mean, I think it was hip, but I think it was one thing to be like an Anton LaVey guy in the 60s and 70s or something.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It was one thing to be like into the magics back then.
Merlin: And today I think it seems a little...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I think it seems ludicrous.
John: Do you remember the Eddie Murphy movie where he went to Tibet?
John: The Golden Child?
John: The Golden Child, right.
John: Just barely.
John: Maybe it was Nepal.
John: No, I think it was Tibet.
John: And he was trying to escort the new llama who was just a little boy.
John: and the llama had to get back to Tibet for some reason, but then Satan was involved?
John: What?
John: Somehow, and... Actually, according to Hoyle Satan?
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: Like, there were some bad men who were trying to capture the golden child because the golden child would... Capturing him in a giant birdcage was going to help them advance their evil scheme.
John: This sounds like a fever dream.
John: And I highly recommend everybody watch the golden child again.
John: It's a great Eddie Murphy vehicle.
John: It's so coming to America.
John: But like somewhere along the line in the film, I think probably when the screenwriters, when like the first run of cocaine had run out and they were like, you know, they were like seven pizza boxes deep and they were just like, okay, all right, now what happens?
John: Well, right.
John: These guys are, these bad guys are actually Satan and they're demons.
Right.
John: And then the chief bad guy is the devil.
John: And I was like... I even remember watching this movie as a teenager and asking, like, is the devil part of the...
John: Like, cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism?
John: I don't think of it being a real demon-centered... That sounds like a high school creative writing thing.
John: But, like, the bad guy is a real... Those are different pantheons, I think.
John: Yeah, right, right, right.
John: But this movie, like, really spiraled out into...
John: into a world of it got it got very in a way it was i don't remember which one came first i think maybe golden child but there it got into some real big trouble in little china territory where yeah i gotta watch that you keep reminding me i gotta watch that you know where there's some supernatural powers that that maybe hint at it's that whole 80s thing where it's like
John: There's a really bad guy here who has some enormous power.
John: Like, he's eternal.
John: But somehow...
John: the the stakes of this film are are pretty small like like this this eternal chinese uh demon needs to marry a girl with green eyes okay that seems like something he could have done over the last here's here's the thing um did you ever see the original rosemary's baby the roman polanski rosemary's baby
John: No, because you know how I am about scary movies.
Merlin: The thing is, I watched it probably in the last three or four months, and I have to say it's so awfully good, and it is so chilling.
Merlin: And here's part of what – there's a lot about it that's great.
Merlin: I mean there's so many layers, especially once you've got a kid.
Merlin: Is her baby a devil baby?
Merlin: Well –
Merlin: That's the thing, and this is what makes it great.
Merlin: So if there was a guy with a pitchfork and horns running around going tee-hee-hee, it would be silly.
Merlin: But it's all of these people who are doing creepy stuff.
Merlin: There's two big parts of it.
Merlin: Three.
Merlin: First is pregnancy.
Merlin: Anytime you get pregnancy and what happens in that whole crazy, insane body-destroying process, that's interesting.
Right.
Merlin: Yes, and then B, yes, you do have these people who appear to be, you know, involved in some pretty bad business with Satan.
Merlin: But finally, there is no, like, guy with horns in it.
Merlin: And that's what makes it work even today, is you don't need the devil to be real in order for Satanists to be scary.
Merlin: Because if they think that they're working and they're basically passing as people who are just your nice old people neighbors, you know, Ruth Gordon, last person in the world you think would be a crazy Satan person, right?
Merlin: Well… Yeah, but what they – that's what makes that effective, is it's not too on the nose, right?
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: Oh, Satan is a lot scarier when you can't see him.
Merlin: Well, and where in this case, like it kind of, I mean, like there's stuff that I don't want to spoil for you because you should see it.
Merlin: It's good.
John: Okay, I'll watch it.
John: I'll watch it.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But that's, in that case, okay, but speaking, finally, speaking of the Dalai Lama, big hit of the Lama, to me saying that Red Dawn like makes kids want to go fight the Cold War is like saying Caddyshack makes people want to play golf.
Merlin: It's like it misses what it is about the movie that's so compelling.
Merlin: And Red Dawn, that's a big part of it.
Merlin: But I mean Red Dawn is about a more basic – yeah, a little Lord of the Flies maybe, but it's really about – What happens when the parents go away.
Merlin: And wanting to be part – and wanting to be an important part of something important.
Merlin: To not just be a cog that has all this theoretical stuff that might happen in the future.
Merlin: For them to really need you to save the day and your special high school skills might actually be useful for some reason.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: That to me is what makes it great.
Merlin: I mean, yeah, it was certainly timely and it was done that way for a reason.
Merlin: But I don't think it was primarily about politics.
Merlin: I think it's about wanting to blow shit up.
John: Absolutely.
John: Well, wanting – yeah, wanting the –
John: the desire that every kid has to Wolverine, to have your parents all die.
John: I mean, it's, it's like, I think innate, you don't want, you don't want to kill your parents.
John: You don't want to be responsible for them dying, but you would secretly kind of love it if they just all died somehow.
John: And you were forced to remake the world in your own sort of with your teenage wisdom and,
John: to to remake the world as as it should be could be i mean the the amazing thing about red dawn to me is that jennifer gray oh i forgot jennifer gray was in that of course you love it jennifer fucking gray is in that movie jennifer gray classic classic jennifer gray that's right not uh jennifer gray new jennifer 2.0
John: And, like, nobody... There's no kissing in it.
John: Like, at one point, somebody makes, like, a gesture to Jennifer Grey that is immediately, like, she rebuffs it as a tough... She's a tough girl with no... Takes no shit off of anybody.
John: And, like, here are these teenagers, boys and girls, together, and it's a very...
John: you know it's a very um it comported with my understanding of sexual politics even in the 80s people think i think a lot of young people feel like they're the first ones to ever think about feminism or gay rights but of course in the 80s we were we were
John: Like soaking in it, right?
John: I mean, that was the atmosphere that we had been raised into.
John: And we were maybe a raw, less... The idea of what was to come was less codified.
John: But we were wrestling with all those same ideas.
Yeah.
John: And that was what I imagined would happen.
John: If all the adults were killed and we were living in a post-apocalyptic world, it was clear to me that the system that we built out of the ashes was not going to be the old patriarchal system.
John: It was going to be a new system.
John: we were going to make a new world.
John: And it was going to be one where there was a kind of equality that wasn't possible.
John: And that at the time, we couldn't imagine how we would get from where we were to where we were going.
John: It seemed like maybe all the adults would have to die for us to build the world we imagined.
John: But it was a much more egalitarian thing
John: future, the Red Dawn future, the post...
John: We all knew that the Cold War was bananas, and it was sort of evidence that adults were bananas.
Merlin: Oh, and also like all teenagers, we knew that the system was basically corrupt and unfixable in its current state.
John: Yeah, but again, like all teenagers, we could not possibly imagine that really all it would take was 20 years.
Merlin: We're going to get there by writing to our congressman.
John: Yeah, 20 years from now, we would be the adults, and most of us would have survived to adulthood with some of those...
John: some of those new ideas intact.
John: I mean, hard to, hard to imagine that, that would be an interesting reading for a thesis paper.
John: The, you know, the ultimately like feminist egalitarian under message of red dawn.
John: I don't think, I don't think that I'm going to write that paper.
John: Cause I'm not trying to graduate from.
Merlin: How about that?
Merlin: How about that George Hamilton though?
John: Huh?
John: Oh my God.
Yeah.
John: Oh my God.
John: It was so wonderful to see old Hollywood for a second, just completely unchecked.
John: He's, he's, he's sucking on a cigar and he's like, he said he was, I said, how many hookers can we get out to Palm Springs before the end of the day?
John: You know, it's just like no more motorcycles, no more guns, no more women.
John: I'm taking them all away.
John: He sent me a hundred telegrams.
John: It was so great.
John: So, like, who knew?
John: But, of course, we all knew.
John: It's just nobody goes on record really just talking that way, except for our man.
Merlin: Did you ever see Viva Knievel?
John: Is that one of those movies that is referred to in the documentary?
Merlin: Well, there's an Evil Knievel movie.
Merlin: There's one Evil Knievel movie.
Merlin: The early one is the one that Millius wrote on, which is the one starring George Hamilton.
Merlin: And I really love any kind of a 70s promo reel where somebody's fully decked out as the character, but then comes out and talks to the people in the theater.
Merlin: Hi, I'm George Hamilton.
Merlin: An episode about Evel Knievel.
Merlin: There's another one called Viva Knievel starring Evel – I think it's called Viva Knievel – starring Evel Knievel, co-starring – oh god, who is it?
Merlin: It's Gene – who's the dancer?
Merlin: Gene Genet?
John: Gene Genet?
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: Not Fred Astaire, but Gene.
Merlin: Oh, Ginger Rogers.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Gene.
Merlin: Kelly.
Merlin: Gene Autry.
Merlin: Kelly.
Merlin: Yeah, Gene.
Merlin: Gene Kelly's in it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, what?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: In an Evil Knievel movie?
John: Evil Knievel movie.
Merlin: It starts out with inside of an orphanage run by nuns, and Evil Knievel has broken into the orphanage full of nuns in the middle of the night to hand out Evil Knievel-branded toys to all the kids.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Of course.
John: That used to happen all the time.
John: I remember I was an orphan.
Merlin: hi john oh evil kenevil i killed my parents to be here how many nights did i wish i could wake up and see evil kenevil waiting for me with a toy just hold it says just standing over me with one of those like uh evil kenevil on a motorcycle we wind it up ah i love that thing great i was obsessed with him i was too and later jj arms of course i was totally obsessed with jj arms
John: How many times did you jump your dirt bike over some drainage culvert?
Merlin: I had an 8-inch scar on my left leg.
John: My favorite was we built a cart out of a wagon, like a rocket cart out of a wagon and some plywood.
John: Like a Calvin and Hobbes danger wagon.
John: And we had open culverts in our neighborhood.
John: We started down the hill and we couldn't steer the thing because we had taken the...
John: Taking all the steering controls and rebuilt them, and they broke instantly.
John: And this thing went down into the ditch and slammed into the cement culvert at a high rate of speed.
John: And there was blood everywhere.
John: My blood, everybody's blood.
John: It was a pretty bad... It was basically the Snake River Canyon jump on a smaller scale.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I used to love to watch those movies of him crashing.
Merlin: Caesar's Palace.
Merlin: Oh man, Kings Island.
Merlin: He did a big jump at Kings Island right by my house.
John: On Harley Davidsons.
John: Like these guys that are flying through the sky on their Kawasaki 250s or whatever.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of like trying to jump something in a Cadillac?
Merlin: Yeah, basically.
Merlin: It's strong, but it's heavy.
Merlin: Very heavy, right?
John: It's a 2,500 pound welded steel with kind of pumped up shots.
Merlin: You can use a Yamaha or something.
John: Well, it was the USA, man.
John: His fucking costume was an American flag.
John: A sparkly American flag.
John: Everything I own is red, white, and blue.
John: He's not going to drive a goddamn Kawasaki.
John: Come on.
John: Yeah.
John: Evil Knievel.
John: It's right there in the name, America.
John: It's right there in the fucking name.
John: It's an anagram of America with a V instead of a W. But he is evil.
Merlin: And then, of course, he moved to Florida, and he got arrested at a Bennigan's near our house for beating a guy up with a baseball bat.
John: See, they don't make them like that.
Merlin: George Hamilton never did that.
John: I hope they say that about me one day.
John: Whatever happened to John Roderick?
John: He just got arrested at a Bennigan's in Florida for beating up a guy with a baseball bat.
Merlin: Again?
Merlin: Alright, there you go.
Merlin: That was gruel.
Merlin: That's a lot of handjobs.