Ep. 126: "Big Cabbages and Baby Pigs"
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Music
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: I'm a little late.
Merlin: I'm a little late.
Merlin: You're never late.
Merlin: Did something happen?
Merlin: Did you, the usual traffic problems?
John: Well, I like to plot my movements and plan my time so that I have everything optimized.
John: And this morning I said, well, since I've got some coffee in the pot downstairs, some cold coffee in the pot,
John: I don't have to like rush to get out of the house because I don't have to stop for coffee on the way.
John: And then that little, you know, allowing for that little bit of extra wiggle time, as I like to call it.
John: I was giving myself some wiggle time.
John: And that's never a good idea.
John: You got to have a schedule.
John: You got to stick to it.
John: So once I introduced the idea of wiggle time because I had cold coffee in the pot, it was that little extra bit of chaos that then threw the wheels completely off the wagon.
Merlin: You have the cascading effect where everything gets pushed out.
John: That's right.
John: I put a little wiggle here, a little wiggle there, and then pretty soon I had 30% more wiggle time.
John: Because I had to spend a little bit of time looking out the window watching the neighbors.
John: I had to play one game of threes.
John: You can play one game of threes?
John: I play a wake-up game of threes, where I wake up, play a game of threes, and that sets me on the course for the day.
Mm-hmm.
John: And but then, you know, of course, I had to I had to find a pair of socks.
John: And that was that turned into more of a more of an ordeal because I was on one side of the house.
John: And I was like, I know there's a pair of socks over here.
John: And I didn't abandon.
John: Once I realized there wasn't a pair of socks readily at hand, I didn't abandon abandon finding socks on that side of the house.
John: I could have just gone to the other side of the house where the socks abound.
John: But I stayed on the side of the house I was on because I knew I was going to find a pair of socks over there somewhere.
Merlin: But, you know, these kinds of post-mortems, post-morta can be really valuable.
Merlin: You know, you're learning a lot.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: You could, for example, start planting socks around the house.
John: Well, and that's the thing.
John: That's what I typically do.
John: There are socks.
John: All over the house, little sock caches.
John: And the problem was I identified the nearest sock cache.
John: I went there.
John: There was only one sock in it.
John: Right?
John: Not a pair of socks.
John: And this infuriated me.
John: There was one sock in a little cache with a hat and some gloves.
John: And so, you know, there are elements of this sock cache that seem like maybe they're left over from spring, right?
John: Why would there be gloves in a cache?
Merlin: It's August.
Merlin: Good detective work, yeah.
John: It's October or whatever month it is.
John: It's October.
John: It's October.
John: And so...
John: So I was like, hmm, that's a little off-putting.
John: So then I'm searching around.
John: I know there's another sock cache nearby this one because sock cache is, again, always in threes.
John: Anyway, I got a little bit sidetracked.
John: I had to load the dishwasher.
John: And, of course, that's not a thing you can just do.
John: You have to...
John: Work it out.
John: Anyway, I was a little late coming to our broadcast, and so my apologies to you and all of our listeners.
Merlin: No, I don't think they minded.
Merlin: It was worth the wait.
Merlin: See, I don't want to get all Irma Bombeck here, but I get why socks get lost in the laundry.
Merlin: I mean, I think there's a variety of ways.
Merlin: There's a lot of transport involved where a pair of socks, maybe a single sock went in.
Merlin: Doesn't matter.
Merlin: I even understand why my daughter only has one of any sock.
Merlin: She's got like 17 single socks and that's her sock collection.
Merlin: Luckily, she likes to have fun with it and mix it up, which I think is great.
Merlin: It saves us a lot of money.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: And that's quirky, clever.
Merlin: I always take my socks off in the same way, which is I take them both off.
Merlin: I make a tidy little, not a ball exactly, but I kind of join them together.
Merlin: I marry them with a little fold.
Merlin: So when I find a single sock, I know there's some monkey business up.
Merlin: That's life fucking with me when I find a single sock.
John: So you're saying that you've tried to eliminate the possibility of socks getting separated and even in spite of it.
John: You have rogue socks.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I don't want to sound like a nut about this, but all I'm saying is that I have learned that in life there are certain small steps one can take to keep the demon dogs at bay.
Merlin: And one of them is a very small one, which is that you just keep the socks paired.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Mine are always together.
Merlin: They're monogamous.
John: God, I love that about you.
John: I'm like your daughter.
John: I'll wear a couple mismatched socks, but then I'm always afraid as a guy my age.
John: We've talked about this many times.
John: I remember being 20 and seeing 30-year-olds that I felt like were repping...
John: a level of quirkiness that they didn't they that wasn't authoritative anymore right you're 30 years old no no i know that level mature and then when i got to be 30 i was like well but i mean you know come on i can still whatever wear a wear a peacock feather in my hat every once in a while and
John: And then I was like, but I'm not going to be show off.
Merlin: Show off my barcode tattoo.
John: I'm not going to be some 40 year old guy that's like dying his hair and wearing like German orange glasses frames.
John: And then when I got to be 40 and I was like, well, I'm not dying my hair, but I might have a pair of German orange glasses frames.
Merlin: You're going to look like a tightly wound typesetter.
Merlin: Perhaps someone that might be in a documentary about font faces.
John: Yeah.
John: And if someone is making a documentary about typefaces or font faces, give me a call because I have a lot of thoughts.
John: Yeah.
John: But now, you know, so yeah, I'm like, I'm confirmed in the lifestyle of being sort of a middle-aged, like a quirk, right?
John: A middle-aged quirk, quirky guy.
John: Not quite all the way to somebody who's chosen to live in Berlin, but definitely somebody who is, you know, still like... You have a very intentional and intentional sense of personal style.
John: Yeah, but I worry when I go all the way to like mismatched socks that I'm like, I'm becoming a little Cyndi Lauper, you know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I know exactly what you mean and I know it when I see it.
John: You want 4% Cyndi Lauper in everything you do.
John: You do not want to go into 14% Cyndi Lauper.
Merlin: If you're older than 15 years of age and you're at a Whole Foods with mismatched socks, you need to check yourself.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Merlin: Because, I mean, it's just the kind of thing you think about.
Merlin: It's like brushing your teeth or wiping your ass, you know?
Merlin: Yes, it's for me, and by extension, it's for other people.
Merlin: I'm not going to go around and, hey, check out my socks and my kale.
Merlin: Fuck that.
John: I'm so... I'm so...
John: in some ways lucky that I'm not a woman because if I were a woman, my style, my personal style, my female personal style I think is more flamboyant than my male personal style is what I'm trying to say.
John: If I were a woman, I would be pushing the boundaries pretty far.
John: I mean, I'm not saying that I would be wearing like a skirt over pants or anything crazy like that, but I would be...
John: There are a lot of fun clothes over in the women's section that I would be availing myself of.
Merlin: I see you, and I mean this absolutely as a compliment, but to me you read as a post-menopausal Bay Area resident.
Merlin: A lady.
Merlin: The kind of lady you'd see at a silent film festival with chunky jewelry.
John: Yeah, right.
John: A lady that's wearing a really big hat, and then when you look...
John: more closely there's a cat in it you know at first i didn't notice the cat yeah like huh that's a big hat but i didn't think it was big enough to have a cat living in it yes it's a cat is that all right with you
Merlin: I think that's good.
Merlin: I think that's good, though.
Merlin: I mean, you know, the things that's balanced by your ridiculous amount of masculinity in other ways.
Merlin: It's too bad you weren't dressed like that when you beat that guy's ass.
Merlin: That would be pretty funny.
John: You know, I was dressed pretty flamboyantly.
Merlin: I was in an electric blue suit.
Merlin: If you look like, I don't know, like, you know, it seems like, I know we have this in the Bay Area.
Merlin: I've seen this in other places.
Merlin: The, like, the flamboyant, zoftig, like, 55-year-old woman who reviews films.
Merlin: And she's very colorful.
Yes.
Merlin: I think that's a thing.
John: She's got, like, black, chunky framed glasses, but that are perfectly round like she's an architect.
John: But maybe one of the lenses is, like, 10% bigger than the other lens.
Merlin: Just for a sense of forced perspective.
John: Yeah, like, she just, whoa, cartoon eyes.
John: Welcome our weekly film viewer, Jana Scantz.
John: I'm going the other direction.
John: All day long, I'm walking around.
John: I'm singing Leonard Skinner's Simple Man under my breath all day long.
John: Just trying to be a simple kind of man.
John: To be something that I love and understand.
John: I'm trying to be a simple kind of man.
Merlin: Does that song change periodically?
John: Oh, son, if I can.
John: It doesn't make a lot of sense moving forward in the lyrics.
Merlin: I think the songs that we sing under our breath are generally not things we should share with people.
Merlin: No, just because it's very difficult to explain why you sing a particular song under your breath.
Merlin: I do it constantly.
Merlin: I have traveling music.
Merlin: I have a soundtrack for almost everything I do.
John: I absolutely do, too.
Merlin: My primary leitmotif is... I've heard you do that.
Merlin: That's kind of my basic transitional music, and then when I finish what I'm doing, I'll go... Yeah, a little fanfare, right?
John: I see three medieval guys in tights with long horns.
Merlin: Those long trumpets with banners hanging from them.
Merlin: Merlin Mann!
Merlin: I want to return to the time thing for a minute.
Merlin: I got two branches on this.
Merlin: One branch is, this is something you've talked about before.
Merlin: It seems to me that you have decided what the optimal, not optimal, excuse me, strike that, what the correct amount of time it is to do anything in the Seattle area.
Merlin: You've lived there a very long time.
Merlin: You're an excellent driver.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And you know how long it takes.
Merlin: Not how long it should take.
Merlin: You know how long it takes.
Merlin: But then I hear other people talk about things like Seattle traffic.
Merlin: And apparently, you can tell me if this is true or not, but apparently Seattle traffic is worse than anyone would imagine.
John: Well, and it's crazy that it is getting worse like on an hourly basis.
John: You drive somewhere and then an hour later you drive.
Merlin: The traffic update is literally a traffic update.
Merlin: Traffic's gotten 33% worse today.
John: And some of it is all the climate change refugees that are pouring in here from California and other places.
John: God bless them.
John: Some of it is just all the people that keep coming here to work in what we call the new Boeing, which is Amazon.com.
John: Um, you know, the, the, the reason that there, the reason that Seattle isn't a city of a hundred thousand people is that Boeing made big jet airplanes here.
John: And for 50 years, people came that because there was good high paying jobs here.
John: And now Amazon is apparently able to do that.
John: Although I, I mean, I still think of Amazon as one of those like never profitable companies, but maybe, maybe that's my 1999 talking.
Merlin: Well, it's still accurate as of today.
John: Right.
John: So I don't know how they are managing to do what they're doing.
Merlin: I think it's a break-even company right now.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: They are still – it's all still lost leader stuff for some future profitability.
John: I mean, I just don't understand how that –
John: There's a reason you and I aren't in the corner office.
Merlin: Seems to me you should worry less about drones and more about making money.
Merlin: That is pretty amazing.
Merlin: I would love to make drones, John.
Merlin: I would love to have drones deliver things, but I find myself having to worry about making money.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: And I would love to have a company that employs whatever 15,000 people all like sitting at desks made out of recycled doors and
John: And like trying to corner the market on every single market.
Merlin: Oh, that's right.
Merlin: In the interview, he had a recycled door.
Merlin: That's so fucking annoying.
Merlin: I forgot about that.
John: Well, no, this is the, I think, I mean, I don't want to give away too much, but part of the cult of Amazon is that they all use recycled doors.
Merlin: Oh, that is a little too fucking sweet.
John: Right?
John: But there's 10,000 people there, so they're tearing down old houses in Seattle just for the doors.
Merlin: And they'll deliver paper towels.
Merlin: They'll deliver a cardboard roll with paper wrapped around it, wrapped in plastic, wrapped in a cardboard box, to my house for free.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't understand how it works, but they are clogging the roads.
John: And the problem is that I cannot live...
John: So a lot of the people who constantly vote down all the initiatives, all the public transit initiatives, all the light rail initiatives, all of the HOV lanes, all those people that are always voting those initiatives down, they are precisely the people who are driving in their cars.
John: It's like a one-to-one correlation.
John: If you are...
John: If you have a Dodge Ram 2500 diesel dually king cab truck, I guarantee you, A, that you vote down every transit initiative, and B, that you are stuck in traffic from 5 to 7 miles.
John: Both directions every day.
John: And so I don't understand what's going on in these people's minds, right?
John: I mean, because they're also unreflective generally.
John: So they're sitting in their cabs yelling and pounding on the steering wheel and driving aggressively.
Merlin: Any one of those initiatives would take people off the road and make their life better.
John: Right.
John: Take other drivers off the road and make more room for their truck.
John: But they vote against those things reflexively, right?
John: It's just one of the great sort of paradoxes of the world that people now vote against their self-interest in every respect.
John: Or at least reactionary people vote against their own self-interest because they imagine, I guess, that they are somebody different than they are.
John: Or they imagine that their interests are different than their actual interests.
John: But I'm on the road, and here I am.
John: I'm a guy.
John: I'm in a car.
John: I am legitimately part of the problem.
John: I used to live on Capitol Hill where I walked everywhere.
John: But then I moved out, not all the way to the suburbs, but to what I guess is probably a suburb.
John: By the 1965 definitions of the city, it is a suburb.
John: And now I am in a car.
John: I am recapitulating this problem in my own life.
John: But sitting on the highways, my solution to the problem is, honestly, more technology.
John: I feel like cars are barbaric and that we need to... Did people not see the movie Minority Report?
No.
John: It was maybe not a good movie, but those cars that are swarming over every surface like cockroaches, those were pretty cool cockroach cars, right?
John: Cars that are like obviously driverless drone cars all moving super fast.
Merlin: Paid for with targeted advertising.
John: Paid for with targeted advertising.
John: Like, we're headed there.
Merlin: The Facebook car.
John: Like, what we need to do, and this is what's confusing to me, because Google is working in a bubble.
John: They're making robot cars on their own for their own purposes.
John: Elon Musk is across the street, right?
John: He's over there on the other side of Cupertino Drive Avenue.
John: And he's making electric cars, and he's got a plan, and he's giving away his electric technology because he's the punkest of all the goatee wearers.
John: And then you got Amazon here, and they're making everybody sit at recycled doors.
John: And then the city government is just, you know, like juggling 15 balls, just trying to get all these cars through the town.
John: And, you know, there's some guy sitting at a desk who's in charge of synchronizing the traffic lights.
John: And he's he's obviously like got a vape pen that's full of Buck Rogers orgy drug or whatever, because he is whatever whatever buttons he should be pushing.
John: He should be pushing the other buttons is my is what I think.
John: And there's no systemic... Nobody is talking to anybody else, right?
John: Nobody from Google is coming to the city of Seattle and saying, look, we got these electric cars.
John: We got their robot cars.
John: We should be using Seattle as a test case.
John: We should be implanting little geo... GPS nubbins in the streets...
John: Like, let us come in, we'll put the GPS nubbins in the streets, and we'll use Seattle as an electric car, robot car test bed platform.
John: But it's got to be integrated.
John: Google can't just sit down there and make robot cars and then...
John: Again, and that's not a profitable company either, right?
Merlin: Oh, they do pretty well.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: But I think you're also describing something that seems like it's close to your heart, which is the – I could be misreading this.
Merlin: There's a big difference between rethinking our infrastructure versus coming up with a way to hack on a 500-year-old way of traveling.
Merlin: So the idea of a road where you have to sit and pay attention while you're on the road goes back a pretty long way.
Merlin: You're driving your oxen and watching out of the corner of your eye.
Merlin: The idea of putting all that technology into a car that would now ride on these legacy costly roads, it's not super useful and it's really not as super useful when you're like hacking the existing laws rather than trying to make something really basically different.
John: Yeah, it's this constant process of wallpapering over the last wallpaper.
John: And the dimensions of your room just are getting smaller and smaller because you're just slapping wallpaper up on, yeah, this idea of Roman roads.
John: And I know you have this experience.
John: You get on America's highways and you look around and it's just like, right, every single person is alone in their car.
John: And this was a bad idea.
John: I can see the appeal of it in 1918.
John: I can see the appeal of it in 1950.
John: But I do not see the appeal of it now.
John: And honestly, I don't want to share a car with my neighbors any more than the next person does.
John: But like...
John: Again, that's just a different way of thinking about the old way.
John: And I think what we really need is pneumatic tubes.
Merlin: I could not agree more.
Merlin: I was trying to avoid saying it because I know it's a cliche, but I totally agree.
Merlin: I'm in a really funny position because I've been in this stupid town long enough and I've been walking and taking public transit primarily for 15 years.
Merlin: And to me, the point where you have to get in a car to do anything that isn't fun
Merlin: Like it's one thing to take a car ride out of town and go to a beach or something like that.
Merlin: That to me is a – that's a pretty noble use for a car.
Merlin: But when I have to like get in a car to go buy things, I feel like I've really lost.
Merlin: It's not even – it's not one particular green impulse or any one thing.
Merlin: It's just like when we get in the car, it's like now and now we got to go somewhere.
Merlin: We got to drive.
Merlin: We got to park there.
Merlin: We got to go deal with that infrastructure so that we can go spend money somewhere.
Merlin: That feels really stupid to me.
John: We had a fantastic day the other day.
John: We went to the Washington State Fair, and that involved driving down to Puyallup, Washington, which was my whole life just like a total hick, sheep dip farm town.
John: Now it has become kind of a bedroom community for people who commute but who drive Dodge Ram 2500 diesel dually king cab trucks.
John: So people that still feel like, I'm an American.
John: I live in the country.
John: I live in a house that was stapled together recently.
John: That classic Seattle accent.
John: Buy some staple carpenters, and I work downtown at the Costco, but I'm a country man.
Merlin: Right, like you're a ranch owner in training.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I work at Walmart, but I have a yard that has a riding lawnmower, and so therefore I'm in touch with the land.
John: But the Puyallup Fair is super fun.
John: It's a place where they bring the big cabbages and they bring the little baby pigs.
John: And so we went down there, and we were stuck in traffic getting there.
John: surrounded by all these ram chargers and then went on our way out of the fair course you're stuck in ram charger traffic again and we got up to the city we were going to go over to some people's house for dinner we got up to seattle well it was a husky football game that day and so then we're in football traffic and the the city and the cops have it all figured out how they're going to get
John: 40,000 football fans out of the university district all at once, and their solution to the problem is to block off a bunch of roads.
Merlin: Oh, to have them dedicated solely to getting people out?
John: No, just blocking them off, like blocking them off so they don't have to, I guess, so they don't have to think about it or so they don't have to worry about people...
John: Pulling U-turns.
John: Beats the shit out of me.
Merlin: Is this like a Temple Grandin, like a cow sluice?
Merlin: You can't make mistakes?
Merlin: You don't make left turns or something?
John: It's got to be exactly that.
John: It's got to be exactly that.
Merlin: I'd like to see what she could do with Seattle's Rabbits.
John: So that's right.
John: Periodic hug machines.
John: Here you go, ma'am.
John: You have nine months sorted out.
John: But so I'm trying to get over to this neighborhood that's on the other side of Husky Stadium.
John: And I come up to 45th, which is the big thoroughfare.
John: And they've got cars coming out, but no cars going in.
John: This is the big road.
John: This is the main road through the area.
John: Wow.
John: And I'm like...
John: That makes no sense to me.
John: Do you think the goal is to just empty that part of town and no one can live there anymore?
John: Like, you're bananas.
John: So I go up to 50th.
John: They've blocked it off.
John: I go up to 55th.
John: They've blocked it off.
John: They have dedicated cops sitting there on their motorcycles just to keep you from going in the opposite direction of the football traffic.
John: So that was crazy.
John: We finally get, we're an hour late, but we finally get to the dinner party.
John: And then upon leaving the dinner party, you know, we're all tired.
John: It's late at night.
John: We're driving home on the freeway.
Merlin: That's a long day.
John: We're driving home on the freeway.
Merlin: Let me understand.
Merlin: You went to this fair, and then you went to dinner at somebody's house?
John: Then we went to dinner at somebody's house.
Merlin: That's too many things.
John: That's like a week of activity for me.
John: Dinner at somebody's house, and they had a hot tub, and all the kids went in the hot tub.
John: So this is like you're starting to see a picture of what my day was like.
John: And then it's late.
John: The baby's asleep in the back.
John: We're driving home, and all week long they've had signs up on I-5 saying,
John: I-5 closed midnight to 6 a.m.
John: because we're going to do some work.
John: And I guarantee you that work is not putting GPS nubbins in the road.
John: That work is some other bullshit like replacing the bricks that hold it up or worse.
John: My understanding is that they are working on the electronic signage.
John: The electronic signage that would have, should have said, when we said the highway was closed from midnight to 6 a.m., what we meant was we're going to start narrowing the highway down to one lane at 9 p.m.
John: And so we come over the rise just past the last exit where you could get off before the longest stretch of the highway where there are no exits and traffic comes to a complete stop, 10 o'clock at night.
Merlin: That is brutal.
John: And then you're just sitting there in the dark, surrounded by thousands of people you hate, all trying to get five lanes of traffic down into one lane.
John: And I honestly, well, I mean, what I did was devise a whole new traffic scheme for the city.
John: You have plenty of time.
John: I had all the time in the world and I had all the motivation.
John: And pneumatic tubes is what I came up with.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, what are you going to do?
John: You can turn the roads into parks and just tube everybody there.
Merlin: Well, this is the other part.
Merlin: I think it's an extremely interesting idea.
Merlin: So isn't that kind of what Elon Musk is doing with Tubex or whatever it's called?
John: Tubex, right.
John: I mean, I feel like he and I are so often on the same page.
John: We line up with each other.
John: How hard would it be?
John: Tubex.
Merlin: You know, you vacuum out the air, you move people around.
Merlin: You get inside the tube.
Merlin: I'm realizing, though, that there's a huge hypocrisy to my thing, which is that it isn't that I want to be green necessarily.
Merlin: Like anybody, it feels wasteful to me to go and spend $4 a gallon on gas to go buy things.
Merlin: I don't know why that bugs me, but the idea of putting gas in your car so that you can drive somewhere to buy something and then bring it home feels vastly inefficient to me.
John: Well, yeah.
John: Have you seen the movie They Live recently?
John: Oh, are you kidding me?
John: That's huge.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But on the other hand, the other interesting trend, now that we're a current events podcast, is the whole idea of what they very loosely call the sharing economy.
Merlin: So there are cases where it is way easier to take an Uber somewhere.
Merlin: I've never done Lyft or Sidecar, but it's super costly in San Francisco.
Merlin: But in some cases, it's just way easier.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: In that case, what?
Merlin: I'll let somebody else do my driving.
Merlin: Somebody who probably doesn't have full insurance.
Merlin: And I also have, I very frequently use, because I hate driving places to buy things, I use a service here in town that will deliver groceries.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Have I ever described this service to you?
John: This is the one where they bring paper towels, right?
John: You have them bring toilet paper and paper towels.
Merlin: Well, that's Amazon also.
Merlin: But there are – so it used to be that in the dot-com age, people thought, oh, oh, ho, ho, we'll go start a company to deliver groceries.
John: Was that a common exclamation in the dot-com days?
Merlin: Oh, ho, ho.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, ho, ho, ho.
Merlin: You have to have that right in your pitch deck.
Merlin: Oh, ho, ho.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, it's funny.
Merlin: Like, you know, Webvan and the Peapod and all of those.
Merlin: And of course, they realized very quickly that no, they were actually going to be in the trucking business because now they're going to have to go out and start a trucking company.
Merlin: So what do you do now?
Merlin: Well, I think, you know, what people pick up on pretty fast with these services, like the one I use, is that basically you go to a pretty website, you order your groceries, and then they get delivered to your house.
Merlin: But that ain't no Safeway doing that.
Merlin: That ain't no Whole Foods.
Merlin: That's basically Uber for groceries.
Right.
John: Oh, it's subcontracting out to independent drivers?
Merlin: Independent.
Merlin: It's a bunch of like SF State students that basically go, buy your milk, put it in their filthy car, and then drive it to your house.
Merlin: And I'm hooked.
Merlin: I'm hooked on it.
John: I don't want my milk in some SF student's filthy car.
Merlin: No, they have a good film program.
Merlin: But still, the thing is that that is very hypocritical of me in a lot of ways.
Merlin: It's also hypocrypical.
Merlin: It's hypocrypical.
Merlin: Hypocryp keeper.
Merlin: But I think a lot of it is just the selfishness of I don't like driving.
Merlin: To me, it is not fun to drive.
Merlin: in a city it's not really that funny you know what i used to like i used to like it when i had to drive somewhere for like a holiday i would enjoy like a four to six hour drive from say like you know tallahassee to the bay area sure that's amazing wait a minute you could oh the i see different bay area different bay area sorry the the secondary area if you can drive from tallahassee to the bay area in six hours you are already in pneumatic tubes you go from leon count that's true
Merlin: Leon County to Pasco County, depending on how often you stop and whether you observe the speed limits.
Merlin: That's a four- to six-hour drive.
Merlin: That's a nice jaunt.
Merlin: I enjoy it.
Merlin: Because that's time for your brain to unwind and think about shit, figure out how to build pneumatic tubes.
Merlin: But it's not the kind of thing where you're sitting intensely in traffic staring at taillights and wondering if you're ever going to see your home again.
John: Well, and it's ideal in Florida because there are no –
John: There is no altitude of any kind in Florida.
John: You never are distracted by coming up over a rise and having a beautiful view.
Merlin: No, it's completely unobstructed by beauty, which really helps you focus on your tube idea.
John: You can drive six hours across Florida and just feel like you are in a terrarium the entire time.
John: Like you are an ant in a terrarium.
Merlin: Oh my God, that's the most beautiful Cracker Barrel I've ever seen.
John: Well, I had an interesting experience the other day.
John: You know of America's hit singing sensation, Paul and Storm, right?
Merlin: Yes.
John: You're familiar with this singing group?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: They're a sensation.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And Paul runs everything and drives, and Storm doesn't talk so much.
John: Storm's a deep thinker.
John: Storm's churning.
Merlin: When he says something, it's pretty goddamn funny when he says it.
John: But so Paul and Storm recognized that it was my birthday, and they sent me in the mail a large volume, which is the 1899 to 1900 U.S.
John: Geological Survey census of various sort of mining communities around the country, and then their initial census of Alaska.
John: So, you know, 1898 was a pretty big year for Alaska.
John: Prior to 1898, no one had any reason to go to Alaska.
John: And after 1898, a lot of people felt like they had a very good reason to go to Alaska.
Merlin: Seems like a place you would go to escape an abusive relationship or merely hide out.
Merlin: Just because it's pretty hard to get to, right?
John: It's still true of Alaska today.
Merlin: It's right on the license plates.
John: Escape from an abusive relationship.
John: Come to Alaska.
John: But in 1899, the vast majority of Alaska was uncharted.
John: And so this geologic survey, this large book, represented the government sending dozens of guys...
John: up to the state and and basically they said to them like okay you five guys go up the copper river and see if you can figure out a way to go up the copper river and make it over to you know make it if you can get over land to 40 mile then make maps of everything you see and then come back and tell us what you found
John: And you guys go up the Matanuska River and see how far up there you can get.
John: And we know somewhere up there is Fort Yukon, but that's going to be a long trip.
John: And just make maps of everything you see.
Merlin: It was really that speculative.
Merlin: It was really like we have these little dots we know about and not sure what happens in between.
John: That's exactly what it was.
John: They were like, we know there are... Because, you know, 1899, there are no airplanes either, so no one has even flown over and surveyed it.
John: They just know from that first... I mean, obviously the Russians...
John: were in Alaska in the 1830s.
John: But they were there mostly in boats, and they were there interacting with the Eskimo tribes and the Indian tribes and just collecting furs.
John: I mean, it was all about furs.
John: Until they discovered gold.
John: And so, you know, yeah, there were a few people had, like a few whiteys had gone up the rivers and married an Indian girl and were living up there.
John: But there was no real sense of, I mean, they're huge.
John: So anyway, so these guys, Paul and Storm bought me this book.
John: They sent it to me in the mail.
John: The book is pretty trashed.
John: But in it are all these maps and color plates drawn together.
John: At the time, I mean, this book came out that year.
John: And they are maps drawn of places I know...
John: But sort of the first impression of these places.
John: And like, well, we went up this valley, we went up that valley, but we didn't go up the third valley.
John: And it's also a geologic survey.
John: So they're talking about the rocks.
John: They're looking for gold, really, and copper and coal.
John: And their mission is to kind of identify what it looks like the land can produce.
John: And
John: Lo and behold, these reports that these guys wrote are incredibly chatty because these aren't guys with pocket protectors driving around Yosemite in 1955 trying to figure out if there's enough feldspar in the schist to justify drilling a borehole.
John: These are guys in bearskins who are portaging like sealskin canoes up.
John: And as soon as they go up the river and over the pass, they're somewhere where there's no information.
John: And they're not just exploring it, they're also surveying it, making maps and using technical instruments to try and make maps accurate.
John: So these guys are writing reports and the reports read a little bit.
John: I mean, they're a little dry, but they read kind of like an adventure book.
John: Like one of the paragraphs was like, well, you know, Steamboat Jim went over that past two years ago, but his companion froze to death.
John: And so he turned around and, you know, made overwintered by hollowing out a tauntaun.
John: And then he came back down to Copper Junction, and we put together all this kind of adventure storytelling.
John: One guy said, two 11-foot-long canoes are not as good as one 20-foot-long canoe.
John: Make a note of this for everybody coming next time.
John: Bring one big canoe, not two small canoes.
John: And I was struck having just been to the XOXO Festival.
John: I was struck again by the fact that people in history, people a hundred years ago, were just as smart as we are.
John: People a thousand years ago were just as smart as we are.
John: Like...
John: Socrates was just as smart as the smartest one of us 2,000 years ago.
John: And I have to be constantly reminded of that.
John: Because, again, just being at the XOXO Festival and walking around and feeling like, hey, everybody here is really smart.
John: And there's not a lot... I mean, there's a certain amount of self-satisfaction in that kind of group of people that are like, we're all really smart.
John: But that festival was very pleasantly without a lot of smugness, right?
John: People also recognized... I mean...
John: I'm smart, but everybody else here is too.
John: There was a lot of humility there.
John: But the general idea of a thing like that is no one has ever been as smart as us because we are developing these new technologies.
John: We are making the world a better place.
John: We are solving problems that have never been solved before.
John: And there's this real seductive feeling that we are the smartest ones who have ever been.
John: And I'm reading this geological survey and the adventure stories are racist as can be.
John: These guys will come into a little village and they're just like, well, the natives here are pretty sordid and shiftless, but they seem to be comparatively intelligent such that you might be able to teach them to read.
John: Yeah.
John: And just matter of fact as can be, just like this is a report of the ground as we find it, you might be able to teach these natives to read.
John: And there's a lot of feldspar.
Merlin: The thing is that that's not that long ago.
Merlin: No!
Merlin: That's just a little bit shy.
Merlin: That's a couple years before my grandfather was born.
John: Yeah, my great-grandfather, one of my great-grandfathers went to the Yukon to make his fortune in the gold rush and did not make his fortune there.
John: And I still am suffering the consequences of him not striking it rich in the gold.
Merlin: A lot of indignity for you today.
John: Yep, yep.
John: But, so these guys, you know, they are, in some ways, like, they do not have our technology, right?
John: They don't have our mechanical technology, and they don't have our thought technology.
John: Because both things are cumulative.
John: Like, technology is cumulative, and intellectual technology is cumulative.
John: But as far as, like...
John: intelligence, it's all there.
John: And it's been there for thousands of years.
John: And I think I need to have that embroidered
John: And hung over my bed, you know, because we absolutely are standing on the shoulders of giants in the sense that we know how we can split the atom now, and they didn't know how to do that 50 years ago.
John: Or I guess 50 years ago.
Merlin: Somebody today knows how to split the atom.
John: There is someone somewhere who can split the atom, and there was someone somewhere that could do it in 1944.
Merlin: But no, I'm agreeing with you, though.
Merlin: We like to bathe in the warm glow of other people's intelligence we've heard about so that we can say things like, we can split the atom, whereas I can't understand why my sink is leaking.
Right.
Merlin: I have a big pot under it because I have not figured out what's happening.
John: Yeah, our collective intelligence, meaning that the 25 people who actually know how to do things, we all get to bask in their glow.
John: But we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ideas as though, well, either that we're the first people to ever have ideas, certainly that we're the first people to ever have these ideas, or
John: And then I read any book from any time period and realize that they were all churning those ideas all the time.
John: We've made such minute progress.
John: And, well, so back to pneumatic tubes.
John: I feel like that's the next leap.
Merlin: Here's the other thing.
Merlin: This is nested in what you're saying, but I have to call this out.
Merlin: I'm thinking, you know, I don't know why I'm thinking of like that John Carpenter movie, The Thing.
Merlin: Because that's all you think about.
Merlin: I really love that.
Merlin: I really love that movie.
John: Jonathan Colton, also big fan of The Thing.
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
Merlin: It's pretty perfect.
Merlin: But you take The Thing or you take Alien.
Merlin: Anything where you want to tell the story of people going out to do something not dissimilar from what you're describing.
Merlin: Let's say you have a mission in mind to go to some – for people to go somewhere where people have – well, maybe they've been there.
Merlin: Maybe they died there.
Merlin: But we don't know a lot about where these people are going to go.
Merlin: And we're going to need people who have the ability –
Merlin: to do the basic engineering, the reconnoitering involved in finding out whether there's any feldspar here.
Merlin: That's a skill we're going to need.
Merlin: We're going to need, or whatever that may be, right?
John: We're going to need... It's amazing that the first guy you send...
John: Well, this is my point.
Merlin: So you got – what I'm saying is if this were a John Carpenter movie or whatever movie, this would be like fucking 11 people.
Merlin: You would need the Feldspar guy.
Merlin: You would need somebody who knew how to use whatever, a sextant, whatever they're using for surveying equipment.
Merlin: There's all different kinds of pseudo-engineering skills.
Merlin: Oh, and by the way, you have to not die.
Merlin: And you have to be able to do – you have to be able to conduct two 11-foot canoes into an area nobody's ever been to.
Merlin: And I hope you don't die.
Merlin: Please make accurate records.
Merlin: Keep a little blog.
Merlin: Bring it back.
Merlin: All I'm saying is that's the part that blows my mind is how many people today could you send off on a similar kind of mission?
Merlin: Certainly things have gotten more technological.
Merlin: But that would take a pretty hearty, pretty fucking smart set of people to be able to go and do that and come back and have it be sensible.
John: And that same thing really struck me.
John: Just that the massive adventure of taking what I can only imagine was a steamship up to Alaska and then bouncing down to some kind of small little schooner and sailing with a one-eyed captain...
John: up to the mouth of a river that you know about.
John: And the reason the Copper River is named the Copper River is that one of the first people, one of the first Western dudes to go up the river looked around and said, looks like there'd probably be a lot of copper around here.
John: It's not named that because the waters are copper colored or whatever.
John: It was named that as a way of notating on a map for the next guy that came, hey, copper is here.
John: Oh, there's a visual cue.
John: Yeah, it's just like, I mean, a lot of the reason, if you look at any map of America, all that like Dead Man's Creek and, you know, coal sink bottom or whatever, like it's all, you're writing things on a map because you're not going to be there to explain it to the next guy.
John: And you want him to see what you're seeing.
Yeah.
John: So you go to the Copper River because you're like, well, that sounds like a good place to start.
John: Somebody, one of the four guys who have been here before said that he thought it seemed really like there might be some copper up there.
John: And it's also a big river.
John: And then you get off.
John: And so you can...
John: It's palpable in the writing of these guys that they know they're on an adventure.
John: They're having fun.
John: But they are masking or they're tamping that down because they have a job to do.
John: And the fun is secondary.
John: They wouldn't have identified it as fun.
John: But they're also, like, nobody's really bitching about anything, right?
John: The guy's friend froze to death, and he came back and overwintered and then, you know, mustered a new group of guys and went and tried it again.
John: Like, they are... And there were a few people that made it, you know, the one guy that made it all the way to Dawson City, and he was, in his day, like, kind of heralded as a hero.
Yeah.
John: Walked all this way across the place and was making maps the whole way.
John: And I really do think that that is still, and this is one of the projects of my whole life, is to see if that is in me.
John: And I do think it's in us all.
John: It's active in us all.
John: That the number of us who really would just lay down and die is pretty – that's fairly rare.
Merlin: I'd still be back on the steamboat bitching about my room.
Merlin: You'd be back on the steamboat dressed in white linen.
Merlin: What do you mean you're out of seltzer?
Merlin: Fanning yourself with a handkerchief.
Merlin: Oh, Captain, when I jack, you are a caution.
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Merlin: We could not do it without them.
Merlin: Ha ha ha.
John: And, you know, and honestly, like the guys that made all the money in that whole adventure, we all know now were like the Filson company or the guys that were selling shovels and it's back to Deadwood.
John: The guys that were selling shovels and gold pants were the only ones that made any money.
John: Right.
John: And that's maybe still true today.
John: It's the guys that are selling the paper towels delivered by drone.
John: are the only ones.
John: A drone drop of paper towels is the contemporary gold pan.
Merlin: As I sit here and think about things like whatever Dead Man's Crick or the Here Be Dragon stuff, for some reason, all I can think about is how we built a baseball stadium that's named after a company that sells cell phone service.
John: They're going to look back at us.
John: The 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 50s.
John: They're going to look back at us and they're going to say, God, what a dead time.
Merlin: Everybody else, all the other generations, they were smart people.
Merlin: It skipped a generation.
Merlin: What an empty era.
John: The Comercia Ballpark.
John: I'm looking out the window right now.
John: Oh, Comercia, sure.
John: Sure.
John: What are the ballparks around here named?
John: I can never remember.
John: There's the Safeco field, right?
John: That's the baseball field named after an insurance company.
John: And then CenturyLink field.
John: CenturyLink is a company that links the centuries.
John: What?
Merlin: Is it like they sell fences or ancestry services?
Merlin: What is that?
John: Well, let's find out.
John: I have no idea what century.
Merlin: This also makes me want to go look up the various college bowl games, which have started to get some pretty good names.
Merlin: The college bowl names?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I'm trying to see.
Merlin: This is the problem with not being a fan, as you know.
Merlin: Bowl games.
Merlin: I think they're named after snacks.
Merlin: You get snacks.
Merlin: Because it used to be when I was a kid, you had the Orange Bowl.
Merlin: You got the Rose Bowl.
Merlin: You got the Cotton Bowl.
Merlin: Now, I think today you can actually just pay to name it after your snack chip.
John: You could just have the Frito-Lay Bowl.
John: I'll bet there's a Dorito Bowl.
John: Let me tell you what CenturyLink is.
John: You might have guessed it already.
John: It is a local provider of high-speed internet, phone, and mobile.
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
John: So CenturyLink, the reason it's called CenturyLink is because it costs a Benjamin to get anything done.
Yeah.
John: It says it right there on the big screen.
John: They should have called it Benjamin Link.
John: So you get to, oh, welcome.
John: How can we help you today, says their website.
John: They're so friendly.
John: And then they have three stock photographs.
John: There's an African-American family looking at a tablet.
John: That's residential.
John: And then they have to clarify that residential is for your home.
John: High-speed internet.
John: And then the next quadrant over here, and these colors are suspiciously like Microsoft-y colors.
John: It's like kind of a pumpkin orange, a sky blue, and a pea green, pea soup green.
John: Then small business is the second category, and there's a guy that kind of looks like...
John: A cross between Dan Benjamin and a Neil Dash.
John: He's looking at a computer that has no identifying characteristics.
John: It's a white computer, but it has no... But the Apple... Does he look happy?
John: He's so happy because he's talking to a redheaded lady and she's got a cup of coffee.
John: They're both looking at a laptop that has had the Apple logo digitally removed.
John: They have some colored pencils next to them, small business.
John: And then under small business, it says for your growing small business.
Merlin: Oh, they clarify that if you want to get the small business services, those are particularly well suited for people with a small business.
John: That's for your growing small business.
Merlin: Is that different from residential, John?
John: It's different because residential is for your home.
John: And the thing about a thing about small business.
Merlin: There's a mnemonic for that because your home is your residence.
Merlin: That's the mnemonic for that.
John: Oh, I'm going to write that down.
Okay.
John: They stipulate that your small business is growing because they don't want you to feel like having a small business is inferior in any way.
John: You are growing a small business.
Merlin: Transitively, yeah.
John: If you have a small business that is static, I don't know which one of these you would use because the small business plan is just for growing small businesses.
Merlin: It's like a shark.
Merlin: We're all slouching toward the enterprise.
Merlin: Oh, but wait.
John: Small business offers cloud.
John: Oh, they got cloud.
John: They have cloud, whereas residential doesn't have cloud.
John: No cloud.
John: Small business has cloud.
John: CenturyLink.
John: Oh, sorry.
John: Go ahead.
John: And then for large business, they have a tall, I'd say 60-year-old white guy with a gray goatee.
John: He looks like he's trying to break his glasses.
John: He's holding his glasses in both hands, which I've never seen a person do.
John: And he's pulling on him like they're a wishbone, like a turkey wishbone.
John: Like he's thinking about self-harm.
John: He is looking intently at a blonde woman in white pants.
John: She is saying something to him.
John: It's unclear what.
John: And then there's another guy who kind of seems young.
John: Seems like he's wearing tight pants.
John: And then a woman who's smiling.
John: And that's large business.
John: And under large business, it says for larger local...
John: national and global businesses.
Merlin: Wow, look at that.
John: And they start with cloud.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: They don't even bother saying high-speed internet or anything.
John: They start with cloud and then go to data, managed services, security, and voice.
John: So they are offering a full suite of products.
John: At CenturyLink for a large business.
Merlin: For the high-end large businesses, they're not even using computers anymore.
Merlin: It's all pure cloud.
John: It's just cloud.
John: Cloud.
John: I'm going to click on large business even though I have no right to go in there.
Merlin: You haven't earned it?
John: I have.
John: Okay, now I'm in here and it looks like a really interesting WordPress site.
Mm-hmm.
John: A lot of green color.
John: So large business is green, all green.
John: And it's just, oh, my God, it's just cycling through that slideshow that every single one of these corporate websites have.
John: It's like slideshow of stock photos.
Merlin: Like the obligatory carousel effect.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Now, is CenturyLink the home of the Seattle Soccers?
Merlin: Because their colors sound kind of similar.
John: So it is home of the soccers, and I believe that that can only mean that CenturyLink is some kind of Paul Allen, Microsoft, like, front company, right?
John: I mean, they're not... Paul Allen and Microsoft are not going to let some company have the naming rights to their stadium if they aren't all super mobbed up in bed with each other, right?
Right.
John: makes sense yeah i mean paul ellen basically owns the seattle soccers and the footballs oh he owns the footballs as well he's yeah didn't what you you probably weren't watching the super bowls last year but i still got it on the tevo i keep meaning to watch it after they won the contest
John: Paul Allen is suddenly on the field.
Merlin: And it looks like somebody has delivered a bag of laundry to the field.
John: He's hoisting up the trophy in his signature look, which is a look of total lack of enjoyment.
John: Paul Allen can make any child's birthday party into a wake.
John: And he's out there, and he's hoisting this football trophy up, and it's very clear to everyone who owns the footballs, and it is this guy.
John: This guy who a long time ago had a beard...
John: and wrote presumably some code, some like WordStar code, right?
John: I think so, yeah.
John: Paul Helen was like on the WordStar team.
John: Sure.
John: And some MS-DOS that ran on some 64K.
John: BitPipes.
John: BitPipes, right.
John: Got Minesweeper.
John: Minesweeper, okay.
John: You got Clippy.
John: Oh, Clippy.
John: Hello.
John: You look like you're trying to write a letter.
John: And so this guy, for whatever reason, we determined in our culture, in our end of history capitalism, that this guy's worth $6 to $9 billion, depending on the way the wind is blowing.
John: Sure.
John: And he owns the footballs, and he gets to go out and hoist the trophy.
John: And now he's named CenturyLink, whoever they are, doubtful that they are a profitable company.
John: They named the soccer stadium after themselves.
John: What does that cost, I wonder?
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: And, you know, I bet that's a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal.
Merlin: I'm looking here.
Merlin: So have you been to a ballgame with the Giants here in town?
Merlin: uh i have not been to a uh giants game no it's a nice it's a it's a really it's a cool park it's one of those new old parks right it looks old and but you know it's got sushi and garlic fries and stuff it's a lot of fun it's a lot of fun just like our just like the minor 49ers yes sushi and garlic fries are what sent those guys up the copper river heart of santa clara county just just like the 49ers before them sleeping on a board
Merlin: So this place started – so the original name, I see – I think you can – everybody is pretty excited to get this park because Candlestick was pretty gross.
Merlin: But the original name was a phone company.
Merlin: What was that?
Merlin: Pacific Bell Park, it was called.
Merlin: Oh, Pac Bell.
Merlin: Pac Bell Park, I can totally live with.
Merlin: That was one of the bells.
Merlin: Because it's got Pacific in the name.
Merlin: And then they got bought out, so it became SBC Park.
Merlin: So our new awesome stadium became SBC Park.
Merlin: Now, wait.
Merlin: SBC is a bank, right?
Merlin: Nope.
Merlin: That would be the people who bought Pacific Bell.
John: Oh, so more phone people.
Merlin: Wait, hang on.
Merlin: Uh-oh, don't buy a new shirt yet.
Merlin: Because then in 2006, after the merger with SBC, this is fascinating, as they say inside baseball, 2006, it became AT&T Park.
John: Oh, AT&T Park.
John: I'm surprised.
John: Why doesn't AT&T just buy up all the baby bells again?
John: Because it seems like whatever the antitrust frenzy we went through at a certain point there when we were deciding that
John: AT&T couldn't be a monopoly.
John: We've definitely abandoned that kind of thinking.
Merlin: Oh yeah, that's old school.
Merlin: I think Facebook should just buy AT&T and Comcast and just make it easier on all of us.
Merlin: Just one giant death laser company that's trying to take us all down.
John: Remember, it wasn't very long ago that the U.S.
John: government was pursuing Microsoft for some antitrust problems because they – what was the problem at the time?
Merlin: That was pretty flimsy.
Merlin: Yeah, because they – Everybody used their computers.
Merlin: That was why they were mad?
Merlin: You know, I'm not a legal scholar.
Merlin: I think it was because Internet Explorer, their web browser, was bundled with the software.
John: Oh, right.
John: So you didn't have a choice how you got on the Internet.
Merlin: Like of all the things to go after Microsoft about, that seems pretty weird.
Merlin: But yeah, and they were spooked for years.
Merlin: I can just tell you, knowing just a tiny bit, people were pretty spooked about that for a long time.
John: Well, and I mean, and it's really inhibited the whole idea of restricting access to the Internet, as you know.
John: No one would dare try.
Merlin: Yeah, well, the crazy part is the one that every Apple nerd listening to this knows is the way that the Justice Department went after Apple for price fixing with books.
Merlin: There's a big investigation about how Apple was trying to fix prices.
John: Oh, right, right.
Merlin: Nobody else has done that since.
John: No, not at all.
John: That's not like an integral part of the Amazon process.
Merlin: See, Jeff Bezos, you know, I am always obsessed with the super villain persona.
Merlin: And it's funny because Jeff Bezos, man, you think about that.
Merlin: He's got the drones.
Merlin: He's got recycled doors.
Merlin: He's now decided that his company that started to sell books will just not sell books and that's going to be okay even though they don't make any money.
Merlin: There's something going on with that guy.
John: Well, and the thing about him is he's always smiling in photographs, which isn't common among those guys, right?
John: I mean, it's not like, I mean, Paul Allen has never smiled, not even on his fifth birthday.
Merlin: He looks like he just had like a bunch of amyl nitrate for breakfast.
Merlin: He's super happy.
John: Super happy.
John: He does.
John: He looks like a raver.
John: He looks like somebody who is at Burning Man.
John: And yeah, he just had two poppers.
Merlin: He's made a bike out of plywood and he's just snorting stuff.
John: But by all accounts, he is a very disagreeable person.
Merlin: He sounds extremely unpleasant, and he uses – it sounds like – I've heard a couple things.
Merlin: It just sounds like his laugh is very aggressive, and everybody likes to point and laugh at Steve Jobs and what a mean character he was.
Merlin: But he sounds like a pretty rough character, Bezos.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, so are you aware of Campfire?
Merlin: The application?
Yeah.
John: No.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Is this one of those teddy bear picnic kind of things?
John: It's a teddy bear picnic.
John: Okay.
John: Jeff Bezos has a thing, an annual meeting called Campfire.
Merlin: That sounds nice.
Merlin: You go, you roast some marshmallows, tell ghost stories.
Merlin: I'm the ghost of bloody fingers.
John: So it happens in Santa Fe, New Mexico every year.
John: Jeff Bezos handpicks his... It used to be a bunch of all the famous writers.
John: Tom Hanks.
Merlin: Another famously apparently nice guy.
John: He seems to be super nice.
John: But Bezos invites, like, handpicks a bunch of really cool cats.
John: Neil Armstrong.
Merlin: That's like a farm-to-table version of Ted.
John: Right.
Merlin: He literally picks you up with his fingers and takes you there.
John: Well, yeah, he does.
John: I mean, he sends his private jet to wherever you are and you fly in.
Merlin: A drone's outside your window.
Merlin: Hello.
John: So this is the great thing.
John: So he has this thing.
John: It's outside of Santa Fe.
John: They put big, long tables out under the night sky.
John: Yeah.
John: with candelabras and white tablecloths, and they serve you this beautiful meal, and then you're all up at this lodge, and you have one of these things where, oh, look there.
John: It's the famous guy X talking to famous guy Y, and whoa, there's probably going to be some innovation that comes out of that.
John: Like, oh, neat, neat-o.
John: It's Wheezy.
John: He's here, and Wheezy is talking to Martha Stewart, and they're going to...
John: They're going to come out with a new hip-hop label or whatever.
John: Whatever.
John: Ted kind of concept.
John: But not open to the public and he doesn't publicize it or trade on it.
John: It's just for the smarts and the riches.
Merlin: Is it one of those, you don't talk about what happened here kind of things?
John: A little bit.
John: But you walk around in the fleece jacket that says Campfire on it, and then other famoses in first class look at you and go, oh, hello.
John: It's a little bit of a Masonic ring or something.
Merlin: Oh, ho, ho.
Merlin: The original .com greeting.
John: Oh, ho, ho, ho.
John: But this year...
John: A lot of the writer people... So this is the chutzpah of this guy.
John: He invited all the famous writers, including...
John: a ton of people that are published by Hachette to his party, and most of them said yes because no one says no when a billionaire wants to pick you up in his private jet and take you to a fancy party where Tom Hanks is.
John: And a few of these Hachette writers staged a little bit of a revolt and wrote and said, for obvious reasons, we're not going to come to your stupid party because you have...
John: kind of screwed us out of our book sales I mean there were a handful of writers whose books came out right about that time who it was just like if your record was released on 9-11 or something it was just like it's all over you can't if Amazon isn't stocking your book like forget it
John: And so I was talking to one of these writers who had a best-selling novel.
John: The best-selling novel, the follow-up to the best-selling novel came out on Hachette and was one of the books targeted by Amazon to be kept out of the stores or out of the virtual stores.
John: But then she was tendered an invitation to Campfire.
John: Just like without even the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
John: Is it Elizabeth Gilbert?
John: I won't name the right hand.
Merlin: I would love to see her let her witch out.
Merlin: I would love to see her just go fucking hammering tongs on that guy.
John: So we were talking and we started to devise a plan.
John: And I'm going to reveal this plan to our listing audience because, A, I know that they can keep a secret.
John: Okay.
John: And, B, I believe that our audience has the power to actually put this plan into operation, whereas I do not.
John: God willing.
John: But the night of the big campfire dinner when everybody is sitting out under the stars at their big tables, it's up on top of a mesa, too, above the city of Santa Fe.
John: Our proposal was swarm of drones.
John: Swarm of drones with cameras.
Merlin: You start out thinking it's like cicadas or something.
John: First of all, just one comes up over the mesa.
John: Pops his little head up, like a little baby drone.
John: And then does a long, fast run right over the dinner table.
John: And everybody looks up and then... Omaha Beach.
John: Fucking 50 drones.
John: Drones of all sizes.
John: And just fucking swarm it.
John: Videoing the whole thing while people are running, screaming.
John: It's like the scene at the end of Animal House...
John: Remain calm!
John: The death mobile, yeah.
John: All is well!
John: Bezos is standing there.
John: Gets fragged by his own troops.
John: I feel like this is a great idea.
John: It would be very easy to do.
John: And it would be so hilarious.
Merlin: But the problem is, the real problem is that would be his Pearl Harbor.
Merlin: And that way he would never let that happen again.
Merlin: So he would make sure that he bought out all the drone manufacturers in the world.
Merlin: So nobody could ever fuck up his party.
Merlin: Oh, my beautiful Cabernet.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Never again.
John: Never forget, he would say.
John: He would say never forget.
John: But you know what?
John: They would have their dinner party next year, not under the fucking stars, as though they own the universe.
Merlin: They're having it in a submarine somewhere.
Merlin: I suppose you're wondering why I've called you all here.