Ep. 123: "Your Mom Doesn't Work Here"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Oh, it's going well.
John: How are you going?
Merlin: I'm doing extremely well.
Merlin: Happy anniversary.
John: Oh, really?
John: Do we have an anniversary?
Merlin: Yeah, every year.
Merlin: It was this week, three years ago, we started doing this.
Merlin: I don't really have anything special to say about that.
Merlin: I just want to make sure I didn't let the day go by.
John: Wow.
John: I don't know if you, three years ago, thought that we would still be doing this three years from now.
Merlin: I don't know what I thought three years ago.
Merlin: Yikes.
Merlin: I'm like the ocean, just waves.
Merlin: Wasn't it the Clinton administration?
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: It might have been, yeah, yeah.
John: You know, we have some listeners that weren't even born during the Clinton administration.
Yeah.
John: That's not true.
Merlin: Is it true?
John: I don't know.
Merlin: I do this thing where I just drop a decade sometimes.
John: I like to drop a decade on a fool.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We're all going, I can't believe it.
Merlin: It's 20 years since Ronald Reagan was president.
Merlin: I'll go, wait a minute.
John: As I was coming down here, I just did the thing where I was driving along.
John: And I just drove in the wrong direction for a couple of months.
Merlin: The wrong way towards your office studio or in the wrong lane?
John: No, no, the wrong way toward where I was going.
John: I was just thinking, you know what I was thinking about?
John: I was thinking about young black Republicans.
John: And then...
John: That was such a classic Merlin groan.
Merlin: But that really got you thinking and you turned left instead of right.
John: Yeah, I went the wrong way.
John: And then I was like, where am I?
John: You know, I got to an intersection.
John: I was like, which way do I go from here?
John: The answer was no way.
Merlin: Is that instructive in teaching you what happens when you think about politics?
John: Well, it might be true that I should specifically not think about young black Republicans.
John: Yeah.
John: Because it's kind of like a smoke fog.
John: That's not the Lock Cabin Republicans, is it?
John: No, those are the young gay Republicans, or not even young anymore.
John: A lot of them have matured into middle-aged gay Republicans.
John: But there must be some young gay black Republicans.
John: Imagine, you could get more tail than Sinatra.
John: I know for a fact there are.
John: I made it a policy to investigate the culture of young black Republicans, and I was fairly amazed at what I found.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: You have the most expressive voice.
John: It's like having an expressive face, but you can communicate such subtlety with only a couple of syllables.
Merlin: Well, I'm glad we covered that.
Merlin: Moving right along.
Merlin: But you're off a studio, right?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Nice.
John: And today is the first day of the Seattle Seahawks football playing team.
John: Oh, go Hawks.
John: And they are going to play the Green Bay Packers.
John: And so everyone is very excited.
John: That follows that kind of sport.
John: And you can feel it in the neighborhood already.
John: There's a guy standing with an orange flag in front of the parking lot where I normally park.
John: And he has a sign that says, parking, $50.
John: Wow, just parking.
John: Parking, $50.
John: And the game doesn't start for seven hours.
Wow.
John: And he's out there already selling parking for $50.
John: And so when I got into my parking lot, so I just like drove by him and waved and he was like, uh, and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I've got a parking spot.
John: I get back in there and there's a bus, a full on like, um, rockstar bus with Vancouver plates and
John: already parked in the parking lot taking up however many at eight spots and the bus is full of canadians who are uh who are tailgating the seahawks game and they're in there drinking already it's 10 o'clock in the morning wow yeah so that that is just a harbinger of of the day to come here
Merlin: We've had a big dust-up here because our football team is called the 49ers.
Merlin: That's racist.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: It's, you know, oh, 49ers love gold.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: Right.
John: What about the people that came in 50 or in 48?
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Where's their parade?
Merlin: Where's their stadium?
Merlin: I'll tell you where their stadium is.
Merlin: They used to be at that Candlestick Park, which is, you know, already kind of on the rim of San Francisco.
Merlin: They built a new stadium.
Merlin: The Levi's Stadium has been built in Santa Clara.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Now, I know pretty much everything is Santa something on the peninsula, so you don't need to keep track.
Merlin: But basically, long story short...
Merlin: Our town's football organization now has the distinction of having the stadium that is furthest from its actual town of anybody in the NFL.
Merlin: Really?
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, yeah, right?
Merlin: I mean, on a football day, like excluding Silicon Valley traffic, like it's going to take you an hour to drive there.
Merlin: Isn't that crazy?
Merlin: It's still the San Francisco 49ers.
Merlin: They built a whole big stadium.
Merlin: It's crazy.
Merlin: I read a rundown.
Merlin: I mean, you go to sports gaming things sometimes.
Merlin: Sometimes.
Merlin: You know, it's gotten pretty costly.
Merlin: For football, you might spend like $200 on a ticket.
John: Yes.
Merlin: Is that real?
Merlin: Is that really true?
John: Well, yeah, because that's the whole game of professional sports, right?
John: Aside from the game of actually playing the game, the game is to figure out a way to get public money to build a giant sports stadium, which then the majority of is devoted exclusively to private sports.
John: And if you spin it right, you can convince the municipalities and the people that having the sports team injects a lot of money into the economy.
John: And somehow it's a public good and having a good sports team promotes the city in all these confusing ways that can't really be quantified.
John: And then you set aside whole levels of the stadium for multi, multi-million dollar private boxes.
Yeah.
John: And with a baseball team, my understanding of how this works, the baseball team plays 200 games.
Merlin: They play 650 games a year.
John: 650,000 games.
Merlin: Not including the Uber Bowl.
Merlin: I think they have five games a year in a football season.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
John: So they've got to amortize it.
John: That's right.
John: And you've got to charge big, big, big dollars.
John: So, for instance, I have been to probably, conservatively, 6,000 Mariners games.
John: Yeah, I understand that these are all just spitball numbers.
John: But I have been, since they tore the Kingdome down and built the steel taco that replaced it, I have been to zero Seahawks games.
John: Because, you know, who's going to... I mean, I'll throw $10 at a Mariners game, go sit in the stands, get a hot dog.
John: Who cares?
John: But $200 to go sit in a football stadium?
John: No thanks.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, I don't have a super strong opinion about it, and that's backed up by how little I've actually chosen to learn about this.
Merlin: But I do know it's dispiriting in its way.
Merlin: I live in a part of town where there are...
Merlin: uh there's like a lot of like working class people who've lived in san francisco a long time and uh you know they'll wear the the 49ers hat and the 49ers shirt and the 49ers jacket and they're they're all super into it socks 49ers socks yeah but it's doesn't that seem a little needy when you see people with multiple articles of sports clothing it's it's like those guys whose uh twitter picture is them with a girl like they're like proving something you know i knew a guy in hungary does that ever seem weird
John: Which one are you?
John: You're the guy, right?
John: I knew a guy in Hungary who was the world's biggest Ramones fan.
John: And he was one of these guys that if you asked him a question, the answer was the Ramones.
John: And it didn't matter what the question was.
Merlin: Oh, he's bring it back to the Ramones guy.
Merlin: That's his kenning.
John: The Ramones, the Ramones.
Merlin: He always bring it back to the Ramones.
Merlin: There's an anecdote here somewhere where he mentions Tommy Ramone.
John: Yeah, you're going to hear about the Ramones one way or another if you talk to this guy for more than a few minutes.
John: And he's, you know, he's a smart guy.
John: He's an interesting guy.
John: He's led an interesting life.
John: But he decided that the Ramones were the thing that he was going to be the expert on or the, not the expert, but like the Ramones were going to be his church.
John: And he gave me a lot of insight into sports fans because it's like, yeah, if you choose the 49ers and that's your church and all year long you're just praying at the altar of the 49ers, it takes care of a lot of other conversational topics that you might have to think about.
John: You don't have to occupy yourself with those questions because you can always bring it back to the 49ers.
Merlin: No, I think you're totally right, and that's certainly true.
Merlin: That's an interesting topic.
Merlin: There's a lot of things like that.
Merlin: But, you know, there was a time even before Candlestick when they just played at Kizar.
Merlin: I think you've probably seen Kizar.
Merlin: It's kind of right by the panhandle.
Merlin: You might have seen it in a Dirty Harry movie.
Merlin: It's a little stadium.
Merlin: It looks like a high school stadium that they're getting ready to replace.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: But, I mean, you read these people's anecdotes, and it's so sweet.
Merlin: I mean, I get... See, I kid about the sports, but I understand that when people talk about sports, they're often actually talking about family.
Merlin: But it's important to always remember when you make fun of sports.
Merlin: Because you're really talking about watching games and going to games with your family, throwing a football around in the parking lot before a game.
Merlin: And in this case, there was a time...
Merlin: Going to Morgan Freeman mode.
Merlin: There was a time when a man could take his children to a game and have it not cost a amount of a house.
Merlin: But you go there, and you could just go to Kezar's, a few bucks to get in.
Merlin: You could just kind of wander in.
Merlin: It wasn't like a whole production.
Merlin: Going to a game today sounds like something where you've got to plan a lot of stuff.
Merlin: And it's like the beers are $9 for a regular-sized beer, so everybody's getting all drunk in the parking lot before they go in.
John: I think we're seeing this culture-wide...
Merlin: as a side effect of the breakdown of you know the breakdown of the of the big monolithic cultural apparatus right i can't save this one can i i just it's our it's our anniversary um i thought maybe we could talk about something that we could put out and now we're at minute 11 and i
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John: You know, the churches are gone, right?
John: Monotheism doesn't have the effect on the culture that it used to.
John: We don't follow the three big networks anymore.
John: Journalism is balkanized.
Merlin: Everybody's got their iPhone.
Merlin: Nobody reads books.
Merlin: There's so many problems to address.
John: We don't trust the government.
John: App developers?
John: But what happens is that humanity reverts to its original project, which is to organize itself according to clans and tribes.
John: Right.
John: Intercourse and self-destruction.
John: That's why we're here.
John: That's exactly right.
John: But everybody, you know, everybody, the internet is beautiful for this.
John: Everybody grabs onto their tribal identifiers.
John: Right.
John: And then their bronies or their juggalos or their, you know, the one guy that's both a brony and a juggalo.
John: The Brunelos?
John: The Brunelos.
John: The Brunelos.
John: And then it's just a mad dash for people to figure out how to profit from that tribalism.
John: You know, to print up t-shirts quick before the tribe morphs.
John: And sell as many of them as you can.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: You know, and walking around town, like in Seattle, the Sonics, I guess the Sonics aren't a team anymore, but the, what are they called?
John: The Sockers.
Merlin: The Seattle Sockers.
John: The Seattle Sockers.
Merlin: Because in the 1700s, you had that thriving soccer industry in the Pacific Northwest.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And now we're going back to our original soccer roots here.
John: And you see people walking around all year long in this soccer costume, which is the color.
John: I can't describe.
John: You have to see the Seattle soccer.
Merlin: I'm going to find out more about the Seattle Soccers.
John: The Seattle Soccers, their colors are like colors that you wouldn't make a toddler's toy out of these colors because you would be afraid of the effect that it would have on the kid growing up.
Merlin: Is it green and like cerulean sort of blue?
John: Yeah, it's like puce green and cerulean blue.
John: It looks kind of like some kind of an eye test.
John: Right.
John: If you made children's blocks out of this, you would feel like it was some sort of 70s Waldorf school brain experiment.
Merlin: Well, here's a good sign, John, is that it doesn't look very flattering on the players.
Merlin: So I can only imagine what it looks like on the fans of the soccers.
John: And that's what's so extraordinary.
John: The fans have embraced these colors, and you see them all over the town.
John: And they are colors that not only do not appear in nature, but had never really appeared in fashion before.
John: Throughout my observed history of fashion, there was never a time that that color of green ever was used.
Merlin: It looks like pond scum and a pond at Disneyland.
Yeah.
John: So in a way, they've done a tremendous job of branding their team because people haven't rejected the color.
John: They've embraced it.
John: And you could see a guy a mile and a half away and know that he's a sounder.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Yeah, that's true.
John: That's true.
John: No one else.
John: You wouldn't use that color for anything else.
John: They found the one thing that they could, you know, because if it was safety orange or whatever, you would just feel like the guy was working on the shirts.
Merlin: Well, if you're a fan of the Patriots, you wear like red, white, and blue, right?
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: My in-laws, my whole family, they vary into the Patriots.
Merlin: But that's not as distinctive.
Merlin: Yeah, like in my high school, we had green, we had bright green and bright yellow, and it was incredibly unflattering.
Yeah.
John: My high school was powder blue, red, white, and blue, but the blue was powder blue.
John: And it still kind of haunts me.
Merlin: That doesn't sound flattering.
John: Because our main opponents were black and orange.
John: And they just looked so badass, black and orange.
John: It's just like, yeah, Halloween colors.
John: And we were red, white, and powder blue.
John: And our mascot was the Thunderbird, which isn't even really a thing.
Merlin: You know, when you talk about that, though, because we might as well bring religion into the mix.
Merlin: I think you talked about how recently about how, you know, it wasn't that long ago that whether it was a positive feeling or a negative feeling, Presbyterian meant something to you.
Merlin: Like Episcopalian meant something to you.
Merlin: Were you an Irish Catholic?
Merlin: Were you an Italian Catholic?
Merlin: There were all these gradations that even if you weren't like a super observant person, those meant all.
Merlin: The same kinds of stuff to average American people that Nimrods like us today associate with certain colleges.
Merlin: Oh, you went to Brown or you went to, you know, like there's that certain kind of – anybody else would go like, why is that a joke on The Simpsons talking about Brown?
Merlin: Like that doesn't make any sense.
Merlin: But the other thing that's interesting is, well, first of all, I think it is interesting to look at the way religion changed through the 60s, 70s, 80s, where you got more into this –
Merlin: I'm pulling this out of my ass.
Merlin: But the combination of people becoming more diffuse, people's total acceptance of whatever was said by their clergy person, I think tended to get a little bit more disloot over time.
Merlin: But also you got into more like they call – I first heard it buffet Catholicism.
Merlin: The idea that you would accept these things and not those things and you might be incredibly ardent.
Merlin: ardently Catholic about these things and not those.
Merlin: But you see that now today in all these million other things.
Merlin: Doctor Who.
Merlin: Like in the Doctor Who fan community, it's not just like Doctor Who.
Merlin: Lots of people like Doctor Who.
Merlin: You would not believe how incredibly specific people get.
Merlin: But it's true of anything.
Merlin: When I listen to NPR now, now I know I'm out of it because I don't even recognize the indie rock bands on NPR.
Merlin: They talked about new pornographers yesterday and I was like, I got one!
Merlin: But there's so often where they're just talking to these guys with beards, and I don't know who they are, but there's so much you realize, and this is true in punk rock.
Merlin: Apps think about all of the flavors of punk rock.
Merlin: But I mentioned it with Doctor Who because it's something that I enjoy, that I'm a small fan of compared to the mega fans, but I've never seen so much diversity.
Merlin: in a community that I'm aware of.
Merlin: There were people who get along, but at the same time, there are some people who really hate this particular doctor.
Merlin: They really love this particular doctor.
Merlin: They like the doctor to be like an alien, like the doctor to be like a human.
Merlin: They hate this companion.
Merlin: They love this companion.
Merlin: But it's almost endless, the number of combinations in fandom.
Merlin: And you might love the companion in this episode.
Merlin: You know, sort of stuff like Star Wars.
Merlin: I mean, it's just weird because that's something that's popped up
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You're a member of a sect.
Merlin: You're in a tribe, but you really get to pick where you get to sit.
Merlin: And I think that's both very interesting and can potentially be a little divisive because things start to seem real.
Merlin: But I agree with you.
Merlin: You don't have the same institutions that you used to.
Merlin: And now that we all get to kind of pick our family, I think you see interesting stuff coming out of that.
John: It's definitely going to make for very interesting brand-based stick-fighting tournaments.
Merlin: Now, would they be sponsors, or is that the people you follow on Twitter?
Merlin: Like I saw at Best Buy.
Merlin: People follow Best Buy on Twitter.
John: Right.
John: At a certain point, all of the Doctor Who fans are going to sit on one side of the stadium...
John: against all of the Star Trek fans in the big Doctor Who Star Trek fan stick fight tournament.
Merlin: This is like England in the late 30s.
Merlin: You've got to pick a side.
John: Right.
John: But at a certain point, when the Doctor Who fans go back to the area around Santa Clara where they have made their homeland, and the Star Trek fans... Their settlements...
John: Yeah, and the Star Trek fans go down to Santa Barbara where they have made their homelands.
John: The regional stick fighting is all going to happen between the sects
John: You're going to have to qualify for the Star Trek team.
John: You're a Kirk cosplayer, and you're going to have to fight against a Deanna cosplayer.
John: Did I get that right?
John: Is that Deanna Troy?
John: Deanna Troy, that's right.
John: See, different eras.
John: I know that name.
John: I've read that name.
John: I think she's an empath.
John: I was standing out in front of PAX, the video game conference, the other day with some people I know and like.
John: And we had reason to take recourse in our phones for a moment.
John: And so everybody pulled their phones out.
John: And I looked around and I was the only one.
John: With an iPhone.
Merlin: Oh, that's super interesting.
Merlin: Most people had Android phones?
John: They all had Android phones.
John: And the thing is, they didn't make mention of it.
John: And I was like, oh, whoa, you guys all have Android phones.
John: And they all looked up and kind of had that like, huh?
John: Oh, doesn't everyone have an Android phone?
Merlin: You might as well have said, oh, you guys are Catholics.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Like they would go, why would you need to mention that?
John: Yeah, what are you talking about?
John: Oh, is there another kind of phone other than Android phone?
John: And some of it felt a little bit like practiced.
John: But also times have changed just in the last couple of years.
John: I mean, where now that's not only viable, but like to some people, I guess.
Merlin: Oh, it's greatly preferable for certain people in many ways.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And so, and they just, you know, back to like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
John: And all of a sudden, I felt like I was on enemy territory.
John: And I was like, oh, I don't even care about... Like, I'm not a person who...
John: brand identifies, but I'm used to in rock and roll circles at least, everybody's got an iPhone and so you never have to think about what kind of phone you have anymore.
John: Everybody's got an iPhone and so it's just assumed that that's the only kind of phone and those questions are removed.
Merlin: Yeah, but what happens when somebody texts you and it's a green bubble?
Merlin: Do you think anything?
Merlin: Do you judge anything?
Merlin: What goes through your mind?
John: What usually goes through my mind is, oh, now that feature is working again?
John: Or now it's not again?
Merlin: Because the blue bubbles mean it's somebody, you know.
John: Well, I know, but I text my mom.
John: uh all the time and sometimes it's in a green bubble and sometimes it's in a blue bubble and it and she has a phone just like mine and so i feel like that is that is another one of those things that like wouldn't that be interesting if it worked well you're in luck they're gonna make bigger phones so that's gonna be good for you that's gonna be you can get a really really big phone
John: I have to say, this is a thing I'm loathe to say, because it feels like product promotion, but Apple issued that recall.
Merlin: Oh, right, the battery thing.
John: And I went in, and my phone qualified, and they gave me a new phone.
Merlin: Did you get a new 5, or did they give you a 5S?
John: They have an internal requirement that it be exactly the same as the phone that you had before.
Merlin: That's cool still.
Merlin: I mean, but it's a brand new.
Merlin: Is it a refurbished phone or a new one?
John: No, it's a brand new phone.
Merlin: That's awesome.
John: Phone off the shelf.
John: And now I don't have the battery problems anymore.
John: I go all day long and my phone doesn't die.
John: And it felt like an example of... I mean, my phone's two years old at this point.
John: And it had been through a couple of different rainstorms.
John: It went through the washing machine one time.
John: I used it as a shuttlecock as I was taking a carpet knitting class.
John: The phone was pretty badly damaged.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: A badminton birdie?
John: I took a...
John: It took like a Berber carpet weaving class and, you know, you use the phone as a little shuttlecock.
John: But the company made good on their failure, right?
John: Eventually, yeah.
John: Yeah, they did a terrible thing.
John: They made a bad phone.
John: Steve Jobs died and no one was in charge anymore.
John: That's right.
John: And they put a bad thing out into the world.
John: And then two years later, they made it right.
John: And I'm pleased.
John: I'm pleased with that.
John: I'm glad.
Merlin: Well, now you've got more battery time.
Merlin: It gives you more time to be frustrated with the things that don't work right on it.
Merlin: Without having to recharge.
John: Except I am gradually taking apps off.
John: I put your app threes on there, but I am taking other apps off.
John: Good for you.
John: Every day I take some apps off and every day I walk a little lighter and I feel a little stronger.
Merlin: You know, you can always get them back, but getting them off there is a very freeing feeling.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And did you ever get that other Facebook app that you needed?
John: So I took Facebook off my phone.
John: What?
John: It's gone.
John: You're kidding.
John: Gone completely.
John: That must have been hard.
John: Well...
John: You know what it was?
John: I sat down and I said, because the logic I was using was, well, I get a lot of work through Facebook.
John: People contact me on Facebook and they give me offers to things.
John: And if I don't have Facebook on there, I'm missing out on all these people, all these booking agents who are only communicating through Facebook anymore.
John: But the more I thought about it, I sat down and I ran like, well, let's name the top 10 groups.
John: gigs you've gotten from people contacting you on facebook and i was like hmm um hmm right it's mostly garbage you know it's mostly uh i do get a lot of i do end up doing a lot of things but it's like hey will you do be can i interview you for my high school paper um
John: Or I don't, you know, frankly, I couldn't remember a single thing.
John: And I felt like if Facebook, the danger is that my Facebook page is still out there.
John: And so people are going to send me messages on it and then wonder why I didn't reply.
John: Right.
John: But I can't shoulder...
John: All that guilt.
John: I just took it off.
John: I just took it off and I stopped thinking about it.
John: That's the end of the story.
John: Cold turkey.
John: And it's already delightful to not have that.
John: But really, I'm narrowing in on Twitter.
John: I'm stalking it.
John: I'm thinking about it.
John: I'm evaluating what Twitter is for me.
John: And I'm coming close to making a decision, to having a referendum on it.
Merlin: I keep thinking that there's been these legitimately bad things everybody feels bad about.
Merlin: There's legitimately these bad things everybody doesn't like.
Merlin: And I keep thinking, okay, well, I guess that's good that we're getting...
Merlin: Maybe there's progress on that, you know, on some kind of an issue.
Merlin: You know, this is the same way that everybody turned their icons green for Iran so we can save them.
Merlin: And then they changed them back.
Merlin: And I keep thinking, you know, maybe we've reached peak outrage.
Merlin: And then it's like it can't be...
Merlin: 18 hours before somebody, a bunch of people are suddenly mad about a new thing.
Merlin: And it's, it really, I'm not trying to be cynical because I understand everybody has their reasons, but it really, it's, it really, I'm, I'm reminded when I start getting frustrated about it because it becomes not as fun to use, if that's most of what's there, it's like, you know, you're never going to be not outraged.
Merlin: There's always going to be another thing that you have to have blind attention.
Merlin: righteous outrage about.
Merlin: And the bar seems to be getting impossibly low for that.
John: It's so low.
John: That's exactly right.
Merlin: One thing, and I want to just clarify this, because I can hear these words coming out of my mouth, and I know what it sounds like.
Merlin: I'm not talking about anybody's particular beef, and I'm not talking about anybody's particular right to
Merlin: I think everybody has the right – people have the right to feel how they want about stuff.
Merlin: But sometimes when I look at the movie listings, I don't see any movies I want to go to.
Merlin: And more and more, that doesn't make me not like movies or hate people who make movies, but it does make me have three or four weeks go by where I'm like, wow, this is really not for me.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's what it feels like.
John: And the thing is, the reason I'm having this experience is that it's very personal, right?
John: Like, I have always been interested in what's going on.
John: And I've always been interested in engaging in the culture as it is now and talking about the contemporary ideas.
John: But I have never been someone who's felt a special outrage about anything.
Yeah.
John: And I find myself being consumed on a daily basis with that tightening in the chest and that knot in the stomach where it's not a response to the events that are being debated.
John: It's a response to the debate.
John: And my feeling like I need to engage in the debate and I need to be in there throwing elbows and making sure that my point is heard and all this stuff.
John: I did a series of events at Bumbershoot this year.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I want to hear how that went.
John: And it was really great.
John: I was sort of moderating discussions every day.
John: And early on in the year, we kind of picked various topics that felt really of the moment.
John: And we had these panel discussions where a couple of different people who were nominally experts on the topic got up and gave 10-minute presentations.
John: And then we sat together and discussed the ways in which those ideas overlapped one another.
John: And then we took questions from the audience.
John: And, you know, it was like an hour-long sort of words and ideas panel.
John: And...
John: Two of the days went off really, really well.
John: The first day was, why beards?
John: Why twerking?
John: Why now?
John: And it was a little bit of a culture clash.
John: I had my friend Elon, who is a producer of The Bachelor, come up and talk about beards because he has a kind of famously unruly beard.
John: Was he the guy on the plane?
John: He's the guy on the plane with Diane in 7A.
Merlin: Oh, right.
John: And then I had one of the dancers for Big Frida get up and talk about twerking and the culture of twerking.
John: Well, it was a real cultural exchange because this dancer is from New Orleans and came up in the bounce music scene.
John: And through his twerking experience,
John: His skills and his bounce dancing skills, he's now seen the world, right?
John: He was a guy that probably would have been, you know, a New Orleans resident his whole life and never been outside of the city.
John: And through bounce and that the cultural because the world has has.
John: gotten excited about and has now appropriated his regional culture, he gets an opportunity to go to Paris and dance on television.
John: Twerk for money.
John: Twerk for money.
John: So talking to him about the world and how it is that his culture is so popular now and his awareness that it's a...
John: kind of a moment in the sun but but then he was talking about how bounce is 20 years old already and will and it will live in new orleans for an eternity you know he was very sanguine about it and it was this it was a very interesting conversation and like huh you wouldn't think those two things went together but that is exactly the kind of program we were trying to do
Merlin: And it's nice, I mean, you're giving a gloss on this, but it's nice to hear somebody who's not super defensive about it and is just glad to see people enjoying it and seeing it spread.
Merlin: It's not like he has some ownership on it where he wants to get his percentage from it.
John: Right, and to his credit, and I think this is, you know, I mean, when you get an opportunity to talk to dancers about culture, you get a different perspective, you know, and he is primarily interacting with the world with his body.
John: And, like, he wants to talk about, he wants to dance primarily.
John: And then he's willing to talk about it.
John: And that was cool and exciting.
John: And then the next day, I had a brony and a juggalo come out and describe their cultures.
John: The devil you say.
John: Really?
John: Yeah.
John: And the brony was a guy you may have seen on the internet called the world's manliest brony.
John: Yeah.
John: He's a guy that works in the parts department of a Harley Davidson dealership in Michigan.
John: And he's also a brony.
John: He's 6'5 and 300 pounds.
Merlin: Oh, he's got like a walrus-y mustache?
John: Walrus mustache.
John: Look at that guy.
John: And he had a real patter about... He'd been on a couple of documentary films about bronies, and he thought of himself as a celebrity and as a worldwide advocate for bronies.
John: But the Juggalo was just a guy from Arizona...
John: named Matt the Dragon, spelled D-R-A-G-A-N.
John: And Matt the Dragon was just a kid who was a juggalo and had made a film about juggalos.
John: And he had never given a public presentation before.
John: And he got up and started talking about juggalo life.
John: And the audience that I had for this event, you know, there's 250 or 300 Seattle liberals.
John: And they really wanted to confront this guy.
John: And I had people stand up during the question and answer.
John: And one woman stood up and was like, I'm going to read you some insane clown posse lyrics now.
John: And I want you to defend.
John: Because he was saying, Jugglo is a community and we're good for the world.
John: She was like, I want you to defend the misogyny and violence in this country.
John: And he very gracefully, and because he's just in the life, right, he's not, he wasn't thinking, he wasn't prepared to be confronted, but he handled her question the following way.
John: He said, well, you know, the violence and all the, like, clownish things
John: language that they use is well first of all they're clowns we are all clowns and that is because we feel like we're the clowns of society so a lot of it is pretend we're playing pretend but that violence and misogyny and all that stuff attracts violent young men to juggaloism
John: And then once they're in the community, we tame them and show them that we are a family and that they finally have a family.
John: And it was like you could hear a hush descend on the room.
John: And I think a lot of people didn't agree, but here this guy was defending his life and...
John: It was truly an example of a room full of people who left there with something to think about.
John: There are a lot of violent young guys out there that didn't have fathers, and if they end up in the Juggalo community, I mean, this guy's point was, there are a lot worse things that could happen.
John: And Juggalo is a place for them to land.
Merlin: I was like, oh, okay, right on.
Merlin: That sounds like a successful event.
John: High fives all around.
John: Okay, so the last day...
John: And as it was approaching, I was thinking back nine months ago when we were throwing ideas around and we settled on our ideas.
John: And I was just slapping my head going, what were we thinking?
John: But the last day the panel was, why cats?
John: Why bullying?
John: Why now?
John: And in trying to put this panel together, it turned out I know the manager of Grumpy Cat.
John: He's a personal friend.
John: And that's his job.
John: He manages Grumpy Cat.
John: And that's that cat that looks grumpy?
John: That's the Grumpy Cat.
John: Huh.
John: He's his manager.
John: I think he also manages that little sort of 8-bit graphic, the cat with the rainbow and the triangle eyes.
John: He manages that cat, and he manages one other cat, another famous cat.
Merlin: He's a professional cat manager.
John: He's a professional internet cat manager.
Okay.
Merlin: I'm going to regret laughing in a minute, I think, but that's kind of funny on the face of it.
John: Yeah, and in fact, he's in Vancouver right now.
John: I hope I don't give too much away, but he's making a grumpy cat Christmas movie.
John: Oh.
John: Yeah.
John: But the bullying topic...
John: I tried to get Dan Savage to be on the panel, and he wrote me a very thoughtful email where he said, I will be on any panel you ever ask me to be except bullying.
John: I do not ever want to talk about it again.
Merlin: Because he's talked about it a lot?
John: Yeah, well, he's the guy who started... Oh, he's the It Gets Better guy.
John: He's the It Gets Better guy.
John: That was good.
John: It was great, except he has come under tremendous fire, as everyone in the world does now, who says anything off the reservation...
John: out in the world, and I don't even know why he has come under fire.
John: But from inside that community of people?
John: Yeah, on the bullying topic.
John: I didn't even research it enough to know why he feels burned.
John: But he's like, I don't want to talk about it anymore.
John: And I tried to get a couple of different people, and nobody would talk about it.
John: And as we got closer to Bumbershoot, I was like, I understand why no one wants to talk about bullying in public.
John: And I'm wondering why I thought it was a good idea to have this
John: to have this as a topic.
John: And the more I thought about it, it was like, oh, I remember why I thought it was interesting because it is interesting.
John: It would be, it's a very interesting topic.
John: Why is bullying, why has it become so fascinating to us at this moment in time?
John: It's occupying a huge place in the culture, talking about bullying and what is bullying and what does it represent?
John: And I mean, it's a fascinating topic.
John: And I remember why I chose it.
John: Because I really, really thought it would be interesting.
John: But as it got closer, and I tried to get a panelist to represent it, and all I got back was like, no, thank you.
John: I mean, I would love to work with you anytime, but please no.
Merlin: I'm feeling dumb here, John.
Merlin: Is it because talking about trying to stop bullying makes you a target for being bullied?
John: Well, let me tell you what happened.
John: So we got a woman who is a stand-up comedian from Portland who agreed to talk about bullying.
John: And she got up, and her presentation was a kind of polemical.
John: She drew on all the received wisdom that you would find on Twitter about, you know, like...
John: We all agree that we live in a patriarchal rape culture where, etc., etc., etc.
John: You know, all the sort of, like, we all agree statements.
John: And what follows from that is...
John: is the fact that bullying is endemic in our culture and that it creates all these terrible outcomes and that it's further evidence that I guess that our culture is unsustainably broken.
John: And then the audience started.
John: And I prefaced the whole event by saying, like, we're talking about these ideas in their contemporary context.
John: So we're not just going to get up here and define bullying and then argue about it.
John: What's interesting about this is, like, why now?
John: Why is this happening now?
John: And how does this relate?
John: You know, cats are very popular on the Internet right now.
John: Cats are a perennial topic.
John: Cats have been around for years.
John: Hundreds of thousands of years.
John: Why are they so contemporary?
John: And bullying, too, has always existed.
John: Why now?
John: You know, that was the idea.
John: Well, so this woman gets up and actually does give just a definition of what she imagines is a definition of bullying.
Merlin: It sounds like she, unlike the others, maybe she opened up, not that this is good or bad, but it sounds like she opened up by reminding you that we all agree on what describes this problem.
Merlin: It didn't just open up.
John: That was her entire presentation.
John: Like you said, polemic.
John: Yeah, was just, was describing her, not her take on it, because there was nothing imaginative about it, but basically just reading hashtag bullying presumptions.
John: And then the audience started raising their hands to ask questions, and I felt like I was at a fucking chemtrails conference.
John: Every person stood up and gave a five minute long speech.
John: about what they thought about bullying.
John: No questions.
John: There were not even... There wasn't even the slightest hint of a question threaded into these statements.
John: It was like being at a tea party town hall meeting.
John: And I'm sitting on stage and this hasn't happened at any other panel that I've moderated.
John: And I'm trying to... I'm like, okay, that's great.
John: Well, trying to interrupt and say like, is there a question in this?
John: Or do you have something?
John: And people were...
John: shouting, talking over me about... That seems so weird.
John: And then all of a sudden there's like an invisible divide that starts down the middle of the room where the cat guy is kind of sitting up there like, okie dokie, well... And he leans in and says, you know, I mean, it's funny because a lot of these bullying...
John: A lot of this stuff where people don't know what the rules are, a lot of that used to be solved in the old days by basically playground democracy, right?
John: If you were a bully, you got smacked down by somebody else.
John: I mean, maybe a little bit of bullying is what keeps people in line.
John: And all of a sudden, half the room was like, yeah.
John: And the other half of the room could not have been more appalled.
John: And they were like, no.
John: And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John: That's, you know, that's.
John: He just contributed a sentence to the conversation.
John: It's not like we are... Put your spears down, everybody.
John: And I was, as the moderator, I was sitting on stage just hoping that the hour would be over.
Merlin: At that point, you know how I feel after 75 minutes.
Merlin: At that point, you go like, I don't know if there's a way out of this.
Merlin: And I was just...
Merlin: Anything you say is going to be – again, this is not a value thing, but once one starts feeling that pressure, you realize that anything you say is likely to make it worse.
Merlin: There's nothing you can do or you're going to sound dismissive of people.
Merlin: You're going to sound like you're taking one side more seriously than the other.
Merlin: And even in deciding like, okay, there's obviously two sides here, you're going to give a lot of weight to one side just by acknowledging that it exists.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: It's like the whole network TV thing of always trying to find the two sides to every issue.
Merlin: Just somebody agreeing that there could be a second side to this makes it extremely controversial.
John: Yeah, and the woman had set up the whole structure of it.
John: Like, well, we all agree that we live in a patriarchal rape culture.
John: You think it might have put people on the defensive?
John: Well, but the thing is, just to illustrate what you're saying, if you say, well, there are two sides to that...
John: The only other side to that is that we do live in a patriarchal rape culture, and you're denying it.
Merlin: You know, like, that's the only other... It's like your thing of actually, I don't accept the terms of your argument.
Merlin: I want to argue with you, but we're not going to start with that as the line.
John: Yeah, and as the moderator, it was, you know, she had a 10-minute presentation, and by the time she was done, like, I couldn't... My job was not to debate her.
John: My job was just to facilitate the conversation.
John: Yeah.
John: And so it's like, right, okay, I mean, yeah, it's like we all agree on cheese, except we don't all agree on cheese.
John: But if you don't agree with cheese within the context of that argument, you are basically a cop in Ferguson.
John: And so anyway, it was an example of when I walked out of that panel, I felt very emotionally raw.
John: And it had transported me back to the place on the internet that I least wanted to be.
John: And I felt for a couple of hours like...
John: This totally new sensation, which was maybe I am not, like, maybe the culture is moving in a direction that I can't go.
John: You know, I felt for a brief moment like it was 1969 and somebody was standing...
John: Somebody was confronting me on the street and saying, don't trust anyone over 30.
John: And I was like, wait a minute, I'm 45 and I am trustworthy.
John: And the response was just like, nope.
John: At that point now, you're counter-revolutionary.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: And Mal would call you a counter-revolutionary.
John: You're over 30 and that's where we've drawn the line.
John: And as history has shown, don't trust anyone over 30.
Merlin: was a dumb idea i mean it was it fulfilled a purpose at the time but as a rallying cry it can seem very sensible especially if you're doing a lot of illegal activities like at the time doing the felony of smoking pot you probably don't want to trust that many people over 30 but as a view of life it does not have longevity right if you're lucky it's a moment it's a moment in history and in in 1968 i'm sure it made a ton of sense
John: But yeah, if you hold on to that as a guide, you're going to be really sad on your 30th birthday.
Merlin: It's amazing how few subtleties you'll find in things that began as things people shouted.
John: Right.
John: And I had this moment where I felt like, oh, maybe this is the contemporary version of that.
John: It is meant to be a scorched earth policy.
John: You're either on one side of...
John: This whole constellation of issues.
John: And if you're on the one side of it, then you are on the right side of history.
John: And if you're on any other side, any one of 50 other potential viewpoints are all rejected.
John: Because there's only one way of linking all these ideas together.
Okay.
Merlin: Well, it's a shame, though.
Merlin: I mean, I can only go by what you said, but it's a shame that it was presented in that way, because of all the things you're talking about, that seems like one that potentially people could find, albeit having maybe slight disagreements, but the kind of thing most people could kind of agree on, which is something that's something we'd rather not have.
Merlin: Why is that interesting today in a way that it wasn't 30 years ago?
Merlin: And why is that challenging today in a way it wasn't 30 years ago, which is a much more nuanced question.
Merlin: It's a fascinating topic.
Merlin: And you can tell every third grader in that place has made a poster that's on the walls about bullying.
Merlin: It's just everywhere.
Merlin: And some of the advice I think is a little, I don't know, it's not all that useful.
Merlin: Just saying no to a bully, I'm not sure if that really solves it.
Merlin: But the thing is, the school wants you to understand that bullying is not okay here.
Merlin: That's on every wall.
Merlin: I don't know what the net result of that is, but I'm telling you, this is as current as today's headlines.
John: I think that the net result is that a lot of kids that are 10 years old right now
John: If you said, is there bullying in your school, they would go, what?
John: No.
John: Look at all the signs.
John: Yeah, there's no bullying at all.
John: And in a way, considering how much bullying there was when we were kids, that's, I think, a tremendous advance.
John: Yeah.
John: um except except what you know the dark side of that is like like are are i mean are they prosecuting kids like are adults hyper vigilant over them in a way that one piece of it one piece of it is the uh
Merlin: So basic educational process of saying something over and over often enough and having different people say it the same way often enough over and over that it does start to seem like conventional wisdom.
Merlin: So God willing, that would be it.
Merlin: That's not going to have a huge effect on somebody whose father's beating them up at home and wants to come into school and find somebody shrimpy to hit.
Merlin: That's a much more complicated problem that doesn't come down to as easy as stop bullying.
Merlin: But somebody in middle school, high school, college, 4chan, somebody out there started that bullying sometime for some reason.
Merlin: That just didn't probably come out of –
Merlin: you know uh spontaneous generation so i mean i think they're trying to you know put down the seeds and i don't see i don't see it like i used to you know you don't see just because the way kids are supervised today it's different but i mean yeah i mean who knows who knows the dread you have as a little kid knowing when i walk around this corner i'm going to be facing this thing and that happens every day right it probably happened you know it's happening
John: Where a kid is going to throw rocks at you or put your head in the toilet or whatever.
Merlin: Your locker is next to their locker.
Merlin: Your locker is never not going to be next to your locker.
Merlin: They're always going to have three or four friends there, and they're always going to have a little relaxation time by treating you like less than a person, and that's a thing that happens every day.
Merlin: I've had that.
John: Well, sure, and so have I. And I guess the part of the conversation that's interesting to me is, like, throughout the whole second half of the 20th century, we have had a lot of social engineering projects that we...
John: that we introduced into the schools, right?
John: We're trying to solve problems as adults.
John: We're trying to solve problems in our adulthood by going not back to our own childhoods, but into the schools of, of kids now and saying like, okay, well, there are a lot of racial problems in America.
John: And so we're going to put kids on buses and send them all the way across town and
John: And we're going to forcibly integrate the schools.
John: And in so doing, we're going to solve the racial problems in America.
John: And it's an example of adults not knowing how to solve that problem in the adult world.
John: And not being willing to make those changes in their own lives, but instead deciding that what we're going to do is go into the schools and we're going to force the kids to resolve the issue by this kind of social engineering.
Merlin: Exactly what I was going to say.
Merlin: It's a kind of benevolent – benevolent.
Merlin: Like you're trying to do – but you're doing it from a good place.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's a beautiful idea.
Merlin: But kids, the thing that's so hard for me to accept as somebody who likes to think of himself as trying to do the right thing and being principled is I know that if I say something –
Merlin: Not just my kid, but anybody.
Merlin: If I say that something is important or I say that I believe something, I could say that hundreds, even seriously, hundreds of times.
Merlin: I could say, brush your teeth before bed.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: If I don't brush my teeth every night before bed and have them see that...
Merlin: That's cognitive dissonance.
Merlin: It hurts my credibility.
Merlin: And more importantly, it shows you that's not how the world works.
Merlin: So like when I was in Tallahassee, no, this is nothing against people in Florida, please relax.
Merlin: But I don't think I can't think of a single person I interacted with who would have thought of themselves on the face of it as a racist.
Merlin: And yet, I can tell you, including me, when I moved to San Francisco, I think I told you this, but it was maybe two months before something that was a weird niggling thing on the corner of my consciousness became very clear, which is I went, wow, there are so many not white people in positions of power here.
Merlin: Every day, a kid that grows up in our town sees Asian people who are in power.
Merlin: They see black people who are in power.
Merlin: You have a black boss.
Merlin: And I'm just here to tell you that...
Merlin: That was not something you saw every day in places where I lived in Ohio and Florida.
Merlin: You'd see it, but it would seem weird enough that it didn't make you change your vision of things.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like in the Petri dish of an elementary school, it's really different from noticing, wow, people aren't bullying each other as much as they used to.
Merlin: I'm finding a different way to work this out.
Merlin: I have a black boss, and she's actually pretty great.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That is what you see every day is what I'm saying.
John: Those projects...
John: I mean, like, integration was a culture-wide project.
John: We were trying a hundred different things, you know, affirmative action and... Bussing.
John: Well, and busing, and affirmative action, I think, was a very positive, like, had very positive results.
John: I'm not sure about busing.
John: And primarily it's because we added a tremendous layer of inconvenience to something that was already inconvenient, which is getting your kid up and going to school.
Merlin: Busing was an unsuccessful hack.
Merlin: Because a successful hack...
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: In coding is something that takes an annoying problem and solves it in a potentially inelegant way.
Merlin: That was a very inelegant solution that basically made it clearer than ever.
Merlin: Well, B, that you're going to be fucking super inconvenienced by this.
Merlin: But A, that there is a basic inequality that we can't fix.
Merlin: And so we have to reset where the piece is on the board and have you agree that that's making it better, even though it's not fixing the more basic problem.
John: And so, I mean, in the long term, we have so much less bullying now in the culture than we did even when we were kids.
Merlin: You can include the internet stuff with that.
Merlin: You sure about that?
Yeah.
John: I mean, the thing about the internet bullying is that the internet is just a giant bullying cesspool.
John: I mean, I'm a 45-year-old man.
John: I go on the internet every day and feel in one way or another bullied.
John: And a lot of the bullying is from people who would describe themselves primarily as victims.
John: It's the oldest trick in the book to get on...
John: the internet and say, I am a victim of this oppressive culture, and so I am so mad that I'm going to be hateful to everybody I encounter today.
John: And that is... The argument against that is that, oh, are you a misandrist now?
John: I mean, are you like... The idea that this woman presented, which is that...
John: That a perceived imbalance of power is equal to an actual imbalance of power.
John: And so a person can be... A person who perceives themselves to be in a position of less power...
John: It might as well be that that person is in a position of less power.
John: And I was like, listening to her presentation, I was like, no, that is exactly wrong.
John: Like, just to perceive yourself to have less power is not anything.
John: Just because you feel it doesn't mean it's real, in the words of Radiohead.
Yeah.
John: And I think the internet is full of people who are like, I perceive myself to be a victim of everything.
John: And so, you know, every time I go on the internet, I'm on a daily crusade to lecture everybody I have an encounter with, to go from place to place to place, just pedantically schooling fools right and left.
John: And it's just like, oh my God, you're just spreading...
John: You are spreading evil.
Merlin: Well, and people aren't going to remember that lesson you were meant to be teaching.
Merlin: They're going to remember that you're kind of an unpleasant person.
John: Yeah, and so the Internet is a giant, is just a giant, it's an ugly place now.
John: It's not a place I want to be.
John: But I think, ultimately, is there less bullying in the world, in our world?
John: Yes.
John: Is there less bullying whatsoever?
John: Is there less bullying in Seattle than there is in Oklahoma City?
John: Probably.
John: Is there less bullying in Oklahoma City than there is in Lagos?
John: Yes.
John: Almost certainly.
John: Is bullying still rife in the outskirts neighborhoods in Shanghai?
John: Yeah, I bet it is.
John: Because...
John: And I guess this is one of the big questions of, like, secularism, is that if we establish that we are members of the animal kingdom, which...
John: The secular half of the world, you know, has spent a lot of time trying to say, like, we are part of this system.
John: We are animals.
John: We are not God beings.
John: We are not separate from our environment.
John: We are not... We are...
John: not significantly different from animals that we can afford to rule over the world without consequence but the flip side of that is nowhere in the animal kingdom is anything fair and we are looking at ourselves as
John: Simultaneously, members of this natural system and also imposing upon ourselves incredibly unnatural thought technologies.
John: And that's fascinating.
John: And wonderful, because a lot of those thought technologies that take us out of the animal kingdom have improved our lot in life and are improving the world.
John: But I would suggest never presume that any of those things are real or that any of those things reflect reality.
John: They are experiments.
John: They are attempts.
Merlin: The thing you talk about of wanting to try on an idea like a jacket.
John: Yeah.
John: So we're trying to eliminate bullying.
John: Even though bullying is in the animal kingdom, in the natural world, bullying is one of the foundational methods.
John: Like every single animal family uses precisely bullying.
John: as a way of organizing itself.
John: Bigger animals squash little animals.
John: The litter of kittens establishes their dominance chain.
John: Pigs do it.
John: Chickens do it.
John: It's a pecking order.
John: All of our language for that stuff comes from watching animals do it.
John: And every animal doesn't.
John: So if our endgame is to eliminate bullying...
John: It isn't just a small little inconvenience that we should be ashamed of and that we should continue to be outraged and appalled by.
John: We should be able to look at it and say, this is one of the fundamental principles of animal life, and we are trying to...
John: We are trying to dispense with it.
John: We are trying to change and evolve so that bullying is not the way that we order our systems, but it is absolutely in everything.
John: And so to change it is not just a question of like, go into the schools and put posters on the walls and indoctrinate the kids so that they don't think of bullying anymore.
John: It's not a small thing.
John: Kids are seeing bullying in every walk of life and in every aspect of human culture.
John: And so if this is our project, I just wish that we could talk about it
John: In this bigger sense of like, okay, if we're going to evolve into the grays, like, I'm all for it.
John: Let's go.
John: But what are you going to replace bullying with?
John: Because if you go into the offices of Vogue magazine, I guarantee you there's bullying at every desk.
John: If you go into the West Wing of the White House, bullying is everywhere and it's encoded.
John: And the more white collar you make it, the more the subtler it gets.
John: But subtle bullying is fucking bullying.
John: So it feels a little bit like the posters on the walls of the schools and the attention that we're paying to kids to eradicate what we think is this bullying is another, to me, in a way, a potential busing.
John: Which is just like, we're going to go into the schools and we can't fix this problem in our own culture.
John: We're not even capable of seeing it for what it is.
John: But we all have painful memories of being bullied as a kid.
John: And so we're going to go down into the schools and create a kind of Fahrenheit 451 scenario where no one is able to say what things are.
John: No one is able to acknowledge reality.
John: And kids are going to be 19 years old and they're going to come out of these schools and be like, bullying is bad.
John: I have never bullied anyone and nor have I ever been bullied.
John: But it's all just like a soup of lies.
Yeah.
Merlin: I think I get what you're saying.
Merlin: I just have one angle on it, though, which is that I'm reminded of the times I've gone and talked to companies, and I always have an easy laugh when I talk about the signs that people leave by the coffee machine.
Merlin: Or the signs about how your mom doesn't work here.
Merlin: I think the effect that those have are pretty consistent.
Merlin: I don't want to argue whether bullying is just naturally an animal thing.
Merlin: Maybe it is.
Merlin: I think we might be using that word a little differently.
Merlin: But what I will say is when you put up a sign in the kitchen –
Merlin: To no one in particular.
Merlin: A shame sign.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Where you're like, you're an asshole because you're not doing this thing that I'm telling you we all agreed we should do.
Merlin: Which may or may not be true.
Merlin: The fact is, if you worry about the cleanliness of the kitchen and it means a lot to you to keep it clean, you know what?
Merlin: Fair enough.
Merlin: You're probably...
Merlin: above the 50th percentile of people who clean the kitchen.
Merlin: I'll even give you that one.
Merlin: The problem is when you put that sign up, the effects that you have, I think I might have shown, I know I've talked about this on other shows, but I never showed you a lot of dogs poop in a park near our house.
Merlin: And at one point somebody had gone up and put signs around the entire perimeter of the reservoir with noting how many piles of poop they had counted in the last month that people had left there.
Merlin: It's sort of like this workplace has gone.
Merlin: There's this many days without a poop.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But think about that for a second.
Merlin: And as my mind at my age goes through what the actual effect of that will be, I see several things happening.
Merlin: And I think this is related to what you're talking about.
Merlin: On the one hand, there's going to be a whole bunch of people, like a ton of people, who don't have dogs.
Merlin: Who go like, God, what a stupid sign.
Merlin: What's wrong with these people?
Merlin: I don't like poop either, but what a dumb sign.
Merlin: There's going to be a lot of people with dogs who pick up their dog's poop who are going to go, hey, why are you yelling at me?
Merlin: I'm already doing that.
Merlin: If anything, that's going to make them less – this is how enforcement works, reinforcement.
Merlin: That's going to make them probably more likely to not want to do it because they don't feel applauded for doing what's been done.
Merlin: They feel yelled at.
Merlin: by this warrior who's going to tell them that that's what they should be doing.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: Most importantly, arguably, I will bet you dimes to donuts that 11 out of 13 people who do let their dog shit anywhere are not going to change a single thing as a result of seeing that sign.
Merlin: That arrow will have fallen very far away from its target.
Merlin: The sign that you put in the kitchen that ends up yelling at 90% of the office is not going to change the one or two people who are doing that thing.
Merlin: So that, I think, is part of the problem.
Merlin: When you start out, and again, everything works in different ways with different people, but I think it's important to remember that when you set something up, when anybody sets something up as an adversarial relationship, I understand why we do that.
Merlin: It's very natural, especially if you feel like you've been aggrieved by something or something's happened to you.
Merlin: It's very understanding to come out of the box mad about that.
Merlin: The thing I think is important to remember, you take bullying, for example.
Merlin: There's going to be three, maybe three large amounts, mainly three kinds of kids.
Merlin: There's the kind of kids that are not bullying anybody on any conceivable level.
Merlin: There are the kind of kids who are unrepentant fucking bullies for whom a sign is going to change absolutely nothing.
Merlin: But one that those signs might reach, the people that I'm most interested in, are this very, very quiet little percentage of people who didn't know that there was something they might think about differently.
Merlin: And maybe, despite being fucking yelled at at every turn about how to act, they discover that there's a way I could change my behavior a little bit that would make the world a little bit better, and it doesn't make me less strong to do that.
Merlin: That's the people I admire.
Merlin: And that's why I always think if you go into something yelling, you're going to have a smaller and smaller amount of that super interesting third group.
Merlin: Who sometimes can be very influential people.
Merlin: But if you come out of the box like yelling at everybody and having a system, having a program in mind and basically explain to everybody what the problem is before they've had an opportunity to understand it, you always lose the chance of the subtle people who might have changed what they do.
Merlin: Because now they feel either like they're being victimized by being yelled at.
Merlin: Or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: It doesn't lead to anything getting that much better.
Merlin: It just leads to us becoming more calloused about thinking who else is wrong about this.
John: Yeah, and this is what I'm saying.
John: Think about all the much more interesting ways of reaching that subtle group of people than putting up...
John: signs in the kitchen yeah basically stalinist signs all around instructing everyone on how to live and i and i guess i guess what it boils down to to me is that the end game for for everybody for any school of thought if you ask somebody to to describe their
John: plan like why do they have a certain school of thought they will give you a utopian answer right the end game is someday in the future when everyone realizes the truth of this premise and if everybody realizes the truth of this premise then we will be living in a world of peace and harmony and
Merlin: It often comes down to one phrase on both – either any of 50 different sides.
Merlin: You can almost always in America today boil it down to one statement, which is, I want people to be free.
Merlin: And it's amazing how often that line could be subsumed in the rhetoric of pretty much anybody, and it kind of makes sense.
Merlin: But there's nobody – there's no George Lincoln Rockwells.
Merlin: There's not that many people out there that actually want America to be fascist.
Merlin: Even people – the people who are saying, I don't want to spend money for more than highways and defense or whatever.
Merlin: If you're a hardcore libertarian, boy, principle zero of that is I want people to be free.
Merlin: I want me to be free.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And the people who want to say, well, let's have scholarships for people.
Merlin: They want people to be free because they're saying in the past, this has not worked out.
Merlin: These people have not even had a chance to come to the table.
Merlin: That's going to help them be free.
Merlin: But there's nobody, almost nobody out there who thinks that what they're doing is making people less free.
John: And so the problem is that every one of those scenarios involves wanting everybody to be free, and all we have to do to accomplish that is just that everyone not be free in this one small way, which is that we all agree on cheese.
John: And if everybody would just get in line about this one thing, then we could all be free.
John: And ultimately, that is why every single ideology is true.
John: Because if we all agreed on anything...
John: then yes, we would be able to create a socialist worker's paradise or a libertarian free market paradise or a white homeland in Idaho.
Merlin: It gets so narrow.
Merlin: It's like no engineer would take somebody seriously if they said, this jet will fly super far as long as it doesn't have to carry a bunch of heavy fuel.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: You said, well, you know, we need to re-engineer these other points of this.
Merlin: You don't get to change one factor about anything without changing everything else about the entire project.
John: So with bullying, the premise seems to be we need to eradicate bullying.
John: When really the question is, how do you make a good world where there's always going to be 2% bullies?
John: Like, yes, you could make a perfect world if you eliminated bullies, but there are always going to be 2% bullies.
Merlin: And so how do you minimize the creation of bullies and the impact of their behavior?
John: Yeah, and what happens with bullying is that the bully is the bad guy, right?
John: But there are the five friends that maybe would be off making projects with construction paper, but somehow when bullying is okay, those five friends jump on the bandwagon and amplify.
John: And so it's what you're talking about.
John: You want to get those three friends...
John: That maybe follow the guy if he's bullying, but also would follow somebody if they were dancing.
John: And you want to say, like, don't follow the bully, follow the dancer.
John: Like, that's the culture that we're trying to create.
John: But is that culture created by putting posters up in the coffee room?
John: No, it's not.
Merlin: I don't think people almost ever see themselves in those things.
Merlin: Maybe it's a basically self-involved American thing, part of the American experiment, but I don't think we see ourselves in signs.
Merlin: We see other people who are rightly or wrongly being accused of making things worse for us.
John: Yeah, if the sign said, it has been four days since someone named Merlin smoked a cigar in this park, you would look at that sign and you'd be like, huh, that's interesting.
John: I wonder how many Merlins there are smoking cigars in this park.
John: Those guys are dicks.
John: Those dicks.
John: As you lit up a cigar in the park.
John: No, we never see ourselves in science because the challenge of creating a world of human beings is to not think about a utopia.
John: The challenge is to...
John: is to treat every situation individually and to do the difficult work of, you know, if everybody practiced No Child Left Behind, the schools would be producing geniuses.
John: But the problem is it's a utopian idea.
John: It doesn't work because you can't apply it.
John: You can't have one textbook that works in every school in the country.
John: You can't have one premise about bullying.
John: Every single kid is different.
John: And that is impossible.
John: It's impossibly hard to create a uniform book.
John: And this attempt to impose like a superstructure and say everybody is the same, we are all, and this is true of us all, in the pursuit of a utopia, a utopian end, where if we can eradicate this, then we will all be living in the light.
John: And it's the way in which every ideology is exactly the same as every other one.
John: And they all crash on the rocks as soon as they encounter one person who doesn't want to go, who doesn't want to go along.
John: And I am that person.
John: I do not want to go.
John: And so I'm getting off the internet.
John: Or I'm going to definitely curate the topics of any public discussion I have a little bit better.
John: So that I am... Is this your farewell to the troops?
John: So that I am dealing exclusively with cats and twerking.
John: And a sympathetic juggalo.
John: And a sympathetic juggalo.
John: And not at all...
John: With whatever the hot button issues are right now where people are trying to... Where social engineering... Where the diamond tip of social engineering is etching its groove in our cultural moment.
John: I don't believe that it works.
John: Unless...
John: It's super trained, in which case it absolutely works.
Merlin: Well, it has to work.
John: It's not an option.
John: It's not fucking optional.
Merlin: The traditional third anniversary gift is leather.
Merlin: Serious?
Merlin: So I was thinking of getting you some chaps.
Merlin: Or maybe a gun belt.
John: You might look good with a gun belt.
John: Several times I have been in a situation where there have been chaps available to me.
Merlin: Really?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Classic hole-having, ass-exposing chaps?
John: One of the great moments for me in a thrift store was in the little cowboy town of Monroe, Washington.
John: I was dating a girl at the time who was very like, well, she was a fire dancer.
John: That was her job.
John: A naked fire dancer, to be specific.
John: Wow.
John: And she had a lot of tattoos and she was very exotic and a beautiful girl.
John: And I was dating her at the time and I was in Monroe.
John: And I found in a thrift store there a pair of white...
John: fringed chaps in a petite size oh brother and i bought them for her and they were spectacular oh my and they fit they fit her perfectly she wanted to wear them and she did want to wear them
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: You won the lottery, my friend.
John: I really did, and I won't say any more about it, except that it was a great... I mean, how many of those are there even in the world, and that I should find them, and that they should fit, and that she would like them?
John: It's like some kinky Cinderella.
John: Yeah, it really was.
John: It was the glass slipper of our relationship.
John: And so after that, I was like, well, maybe I should have some chaps.
John: And I thought about it a few times.
John: And a new journey begun.
John: And I've had several chaps come my way.
John: And the problem is that when I wear chaps...
John: It is just like I am reanimating the cow.