Ep. 129: "Museo De Garbagemen"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Merlin.
Merlin: John in the morning.
Merlin: Feels early.
Merlin: Feels early.
John: Things are good.
John: I made the mistake this morning of getting a quad Americano.
John: That's like four espressos with water.
John: Yeah.
John: And it's too much.
John: You start the day just on a jeep ride down a Costa Rican mountain road.
Merlin: John Roderick for Quad Americanos.
John: You ever have a feeling like you really need to reach your destination?
John: So I'm sitting here and I'm, you know, I'm simultaneously agitated and excited.
John: Yeah.
John: But also... Also... Yes.
John: Cramping and, you know...
John: One foot is going.
John: Imagine if you were still eating the glutens, how much worse that would be.
John: It's a lot to ask your body to deal with right away.
John: And last night, the last thing I ate before I went to bed was a bunch of Indian food.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, I have so much to say about this.
Merlin: It's funny you should say that.
Merlin: This is a terrific topic.
Merlin: I woke up and I had a good night's sleep.
Merlin: I got up and my part two, if you like, is that I had two small cups of espresso.
Merlin: They were not large, but they were pretty intense.
Merlin: Demitasse.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And actually, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is a new workflow that I've been doing that's really a bad idea.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'd love to hear about bad new workflow.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, it's about time.
Merlin: Life hack.
Merlin: First of all, I had something here on my list I wanted to share with you, which is that I have discovered a brand of canned chili that I like.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Hold the presses.
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
Merlin: Lay it on me.
Merlin: Well, and the problem is, I want to get to that.
Merlin: Should we ask them to sponsor our podcast?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And the problem is my workflow, I don't know how this happens, but I'll have my first dinner at night with my family, and then they go off to sleep, and I'm sitting there.
Merlin: You send them off.
Merlin: I send them off, say, thanks for your time.
Merlin: We'll circle back in the morning, and then I go and I watch whatever's on TV, on my version of TV.
Merlin: So I'm sitting there and I'm watching Homeland, and I say, hmm, you know, it's 10, 20.
Merlin: It's been a long time since my last dinner.
Merlin: All I've had is first dinner, and then I think, I think, you know, I owe it to myself.
Merlin: I should have a little snack.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This is part of the workflow.
Merlin: Part of the workflow is deceiving myself into thinking, maybe I'll have half a piece of fruit.
Merlin: Or maybe I could have something that would be very simple and wouldn't make dishes.
John: One slice of frozen bacon.
Merlin: And then I see the collection of Wolf Brand canned chili staring me in the face.
Merlin: Wolf Brand.
Merlin: I pour it into a bowl.
Merlin: And about 118 seconds later, I'm literally eating a can of chili at 1020 at night.
Merlin: And I can eat the whole thing.
Merlin: If there's leftover rice, leftover noodles, leftover anything, I'll put it over leftover chili.
Merlin: I don't fucking care.
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: And I'm sitting there watching television and eating chili at 1020 at night.
Merlin: Now, that's the part one.
Merlin: Because the part two is then I get up in the morning and I have two espressos.
Sure.
John: Sure.
Merlin: There's a lot to talk about here, for sure.
John: You're powered by yesterday's chili, and then you put high-octane fuel right on top of that.
Merlin: But I mean, it's almost like a little kid's science class where you first make the baking soda volcanoes.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's like baking soda before bed and then a nice big cup of vinegar in the morning.
Yeah.
Merlin: And I'm suddenly I'm Krakatoa.
John: At a certain point in the pump chili years, I got very suspicious of what was in canned chili.
John: Such that even though in the course of a typical day in modern life, there are 25 different things you put in your body where you cannot possibly know what has gone on.
Merlin: Yeah, and the more convenient that food is, the smaller the ingredients are on the label and the less you care.
Merlin: So you just need to get to the next thing.
Merlin: So you've got to put something on your face.
John: Okay, I'll eat this.
John: I mean, definitely some portion of this has been extruded from an extruder.
John: But I'm going to eat it.
John: But chili just started to like, I would stand in the grocery store chili aisle and I would look at these cans of chili.
John: I'm reading the back and I'm searching the label for clues.
John: And I just started to feel like this particular product, it's too easy to sneak out.
John: 20% rodent hair.
John: Oh, right.
John: Sure.
John: Into this product.
John: It's just too easy as they're cooking up this chili for everything to be in it.
John: And I, I got, I got really, I got scared and it was, it was, um, or just like freaked out about it.
John: You know, you get those little, I don't have to tell you, you get a little thing on the horizon.
John: You get a little point on the little, little spot on the vanishing point that just, it's like somebody standing there with a mirror and
John: In this hot sun.
John: And you're like, what is that?
John: Flash.
John: Ah!
John: And so I started going to the hippie store and buying vegan chili.
John: Which is terrible.
Merlin: It's healthy.
John: There's got to be good stuff in here, right?
John: It's terrible.
John: It's awful.
Right.
John: But it is, you know, I've discussed this, I think, before.
John: It's a chili base.
John: And then it's got the beans.
John: It's got vegetables in it.
John: It's got some kind of fake meat in the form of soy.
John: Like a textured vegetable protein kind of thing.
John: And then, you know, then I throw a couple of pounds of hamburger that I have sourced.
Mm-hmm.
John: And I feel like I've made a kind of workable compromise.
John: But it means that chili is now an involved process for me.
John: I can't just go get, because a can of this vegan stuff, if you just pop it open at 10, 20 at night, throw it over some leftover rice, you're really sad.
Merlin: Oh, I mean, it completely changes the equation because you might as well go make a beef Wellington.
Merlin: First of all, you're making dishes.
Merlin: I don't like making dishes.
Merlin: And not at 1020 at night.
Merlin: But I 100% agree.
Merlin: You know, you got me into the idea of canned chili a few years ago, and I've been exploring it quietly on my own.
Merlin: And based on what's easy to get, because I don't want to go in anything too complicated.
Merlin: Obviously, personally, I don't want to go down the vegan chili route.
Merlin: I don't want to browning meat at 1030 at night.
Merlin: Nope.
Merlin: You know, and you know, there's ways around that.
Merlin: You could brown that and have it in your freezer.
Merlin: Sure.
John: But the thing about Wolf brand chili, I like it.
John: I like it in concept.
John: There's a little bit like Wolf brand.
John: It's a little bit on the nose.
Yeah.
John: But I feel like if you are endorsing Wolf Brand Chili and you feel like there are high quality ingredients and a minimum, like a workable percentage of mice and rats that have fallen into the machines.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: then yes i think it's probably a texas rounding error i don't think they deliberately put a lot in but oh gosh john there are just this is a perfect topic so many angles on this i uh i was just reading about different kinds of canned chilies and i learned that i could get the wolf chili which is one of those like kind of like a fake cult food it's one of those things like a coors kind of thing where it was like oh you can't get this outside of texas of course you were reading up on canned chili that's a thing it never occurred to me to do
Merlin: Well, yeah, but let's take a step back.
John: So you're telling me there are guys bootlegging wolf chili.
Merlin: Well, now I think Smokey and the Bandit blew the doors open.
Merlin: And now because of distribution improvements in the Internet, you can get wolf chili places now, places like California.
Merlin: But I want to go back to something you said, which is really true.
Merlin: And I don't want to go too far back into the pump chili thing, but it's worth repeating for new people.
Merlin: is that if you think about the eight it's not a food chain it's not a pyramid but if you think about the idea of like up here you got the cow eating grass and that's kind of the canonical cow and then at some point that cow gets made up into different his muscles get sliced up into different kinds of cuts and you say oh well this is a fillet this is a flat iron steak like there's probably not a surpassing number of sewing needles and wrap poop in this like that's meat yeah
Merlin: Yeah, but then it gets further and further down the line.
Merlin: It's been sluiced more and more ways.
Merlin: Pretty soon you got stuff like chicken nuggets, which are made out of all the parts of chicken that we couldn't just serve as a piece of chicken, but we don't want to throw it away.
John: Right.
John: There's a guy in knee-high boots with a hose.
John: Chicken boots.
John: With a hose.
John: And he is spraying the chicken nuggets parts into a hole in the floor.
Yeah.
John: And then underneath that hole in the floor, there's some machine that's making chicken nuggets.
John: That's where I draw the line.
John: I draw the line at that guy.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: And then on the other – if you want to take this down a different branch, you've got variety meats.
Merlin: You've got all the different pieces.
Merlin: Like when you go to the grocery store, you'll see like, you know, not prominently displayed, but you'll see, oh, you can get the hooves of the pig.
Merlin: You can get the snout of the pig because a lot of folks in my neighborhood are making that into food for their family.
Merlin: And that's like a totally that's like a normal thing.
Merlin: But, you know, you're right, though.
Merlin: The thing with chili is chili is like the result of a board meeting.
Merlin: Chili is like somebody said, we got all of this like grade D meat.
Merlin: We're not sure what to do with.
Merlin: How could we use not too much of that plus flavors to put stuff in a can?
Merlin: So, I mean, if you start from the concept as chili, not as this great frontier food, you know, with farm to table beef, you start to kind of reverse engineer your chili.
Merlin: You're going to realize there's a lot of stuff in there that's based on like financial expediency.
John: Well, it's true, but I had a very interesting conversation about a year and a half ago with my good friend Kurt Timmermeister.
John: Have I ever introduced you to Kurt Timmermeister?
John: I don't think I know Kurt.
John: Well, Kurt Timmermeister is a man of a certain age, and he used to own a cafe in Seattle called the Cafe Setiem, which was kind of...
John: French food, but done in the style of the early 90s, which is to say he had chile chiles on his menu.
John: It wasn't authentically French.
John: It was French-ish food.
John: And that was a cafe that I spent sometimes five days a week in.
John: I would just go.
John: I'd sit at a table.
John: It was...
John: You know, back when you could smoke in a cafe, so I would sit in the back and I would smoke and drink coffee and then I would have food and people would come visit with me.
John: My friends were there.
John: I would sometimes get mail there.
John: It was like my little home pad.
Merlin: Like a little Pacific Northwest Hemingway.
John: There was no alcohol drinking.
John: It was post-alcohol times.
John: But it was all day long.
John: You could sit in there and the constituency would turn over a couple of times.
John: In the morning, you'd have your morning friends and then the afternoon friends would come in and then you could even take it into the evening friends just in this one place.
John: Anyway, at a certain point in the end of the 90s, Kurt Timmermeister decided that he was fed up with
John: Running a cafe fed up with Broadway.
John: And he took his he sold his business.
John: He took the money.
John: He took the ferry boat over to Vashon Island, which is the hippie island off the off the coast of Seattle here.
John: And he bought himself 50 or 100 acres of farm.
John: and there was a little old cabin on it, and he started to... He got a couple of cows, he got a couple of pigs, he got some chickens, and he started to be a gentleman farmer.
John: And at a certain point, he started having...
John: a dinner at his house where the premise was he, he invited the first group of people to the dinner and then the subsequent dinner, you had to be either a member of that first group or recommended by somebody in the first group, right?
John: It became a kind of like pyramid scheme of guests where you had to be somehow connected to somebody who'd already been at the dinner.
John: He had to actually come with them, I think.
John: He had to be their guest.
John: And everything at the dinner, Kurt grew on his own property.
John: Wow.
John: Except for the coffee, the sugar, the salt, and the wheat, I think.
John: And he tried to source those things from within 30 miles of Vashon Island.
John: Anyway, it became a very early one of these.
John: It was like one of the first of these events where everything that we're eating at the table is communal style meal.
John: Everything was made here, like actually grazed here on this farm.
John: So we know everything that these cows have ever eaten.
John: And the milk and the cheese we made from, you know, it's all from these same cows and et cetera, et cetera.
John: And it became, as you can imagine, a really... It must have been a hot ticket.
John: It was a hot ticket and...
John: And so at a certain point, it got out of control, and Kurt started making people write essays to see if they – because he would announce at dinner there were 150 seats at the table, and there would be 5,000 people wanting to go.
Merlin: That's a lot of work.
John: Yeah.
John: So it became a lot of work, and eventually he stopped doing that.
John: Now he's just making artist anal cheeses and selling them.
John: He's opening a little store here in Seattle where he just sells his artist anal cheese.
John: But what the heck was I?
John: The provenance of chili.
John: Oh, right.
John: So I'm on a radio program at one point, about a year and a half ago, and we're talking about the gray, that gray beef that was a cause celeb a year or two ago.
John: You know what I'm talking about?
John: The, oh, pink.
John: Oh, pink slime?
John: Pink slime.
Merlin: We're talking about pink slime.
Merlin: Oh, gosh, yeah.
John: We're talking about pink slime on the radio, and it's public radio, so the public radio.
John: Is this Luke?
John: No, it's not Luke.
John: Luke is hardly public radio.
John: This is like actual public radio where the public has a component in it.
John: It's not just Luke Burbank talking.
John: And the host says...
John: Boy, pink slime, am I right?
John: Am I right?
John: Nobody likes pink slime.
John: It's the worst.
John: Let's go to you, Kurt Timmermeister, a gentleman farmer, legendary sort of epicurean and natural food advocate.
John: How do you feel about pink slime?
John: Pretty bad, right?
John: And Kurt Timmermeister, a man I respect greatly, said, actually, if I had the technology to create pink slime on our farm, I would do it in a second.
John: And you could hear across Seattle the collective gasp
John: Of all the people who were like, what?
John: Our hero?
John: Kurt Timmermeister?
John: Pink slime?
John: And he said, listen, there's nothing about pink slime that you're not eating already.
John: It's just all the parts of the cow that you can't scrape off.
John: I mean, you know, if I could sit with an X-Acto knife and scrape all the little bits of beef out of all the little corners...
John: It's the same.
John: It's just the beef that was right next to the beef that we cut off with a knife.
Merlin: It's almost like a natural result of peak beef.
Merlin: Like you can't afford to waste any of this.
Merlin: We could use this for something.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Because it looks like – I'm looking at photos here of it, and it looks – it is pink and extruded, and it looks kind of like – so it's all those pieces where they slurry it all together, and then it comes out like soft serve?
John: I guess they boil the cow or somehow they get those little bits out and they mush it all together and it becomes a kind of toothpaste of beef.
John: But Kurt, a guy that I would expect if he had real issues with
John: pink slime he would you know he'd be all over it it was it was an it was a softball pitch to him and he was like listen as a farmer as somebody who like routinely butchers a cow and feels pretty bad about all of the stuff that just goes into dog food
John: Like if I could scrape all that stuff off and put it in chili, I would do it.
John: And it's not bad for you and it's not – I think it gets bad when you start bleaching it and coloring it and – Yeah.
Merlin: I mean if – I would say the main beef, if you like, with pink slime would be that you're not sure what parts it came from, what all is in there.
Merlin: And you get into the mad cow thing where if you got a whole bunch of different cows from different places –
Merlin: Imagine to make pink slime with economies of scale, you're going to have to have cows and strangers.
John: Yeah, right.
John: There's going to be brains in there and there's going to be eyelashes.
John: I mean, that's not stuff that I want.
John: But it's very hard for me living in an industrial society to know where to draw the line.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Because, you know, you go to places like, for instance, up here in the Northwest, we have a thing called Taco Time, which is a chain.
John: But it's a nice chain.
John: I described Taco Time as fast food to my mom the other day, and she was offended.
John: She was like, Taco Time's not fast food.
John: Is it like an In-N-Out burger thing?
John: Yeah.
John: It's precisely that.
John: It's a higher cut of fast food.
Mm-hmm.
John: But they've got 25 locations or something like that.
John: They are not petting and cooing to their cows and calling them by name as they lead them into like a lavender-scented abattoir.
John: They're buying beef on the market, you know, and you are dependent on somebody up the food chain that you never met, that guy in the boots with the hoes.
John: It's like, well, do we throw the eyelashes away or do we put them in the hamburger?
Merlin: Well, I've tried to, in my experimenting with these different chilies, I am a little bit of a label reader.
Merlin: And I mean, just on the face of it, what was the other one?
Merlin: The other brand that I've been getting that's like, okay, good.
Merlin: Well, first of all, I mean, let's be honest.
Merlin: Like on the face of it, you look at canned chili and I haven't had a dog in a pretty long time.
Merlin: But I think if you dumped out a thing of – see, now I'm thinking of 70s dog food, so I might already be on the wrong page.
Merlin: But I mean if you dumped out what I remember canned dog food looking like, if you dumped that out and then dumped out even premium canned chili next to it, I wonder how different they look.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because it's not pretty.
John: There aren't beets in the dog food.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: There might be eyelashes.
Merlin: But, like, with this, I mean, like, for example, what was the other brand I've been getting?
Merlin: The one I've been getting for a while that's really easy to get is... I'm checking my online grocery shopping list here.
Merlin: Stag.
Merlin: Stag.
Merlin: Yeah, Stag.
Merlin: Which is, you know, which is fine.
Merlin: But, you know, the first ingredient is water.
John: Yep.
Merlin: I think the second ingredient is, you know, the thing is the meat doesn't show up.
John: Horsehair blanket.
Yeah.
Merlin: But, you know, the first ingredient on the wolf chili is, you know, meat.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah, isn't that crazy?
Merlin: I don't see how that's even possible.
Merlin: But it's got chunks and it's got ground.
Merlin: And, you know, I'm sure the process of making that is horrific.
Merlin: But I enjoy it.
Merlin: I think it's good.
Merlin: I mean, it's canned chili.
Merlin: What do you expect?
John: Yeah, you know, a lot of our listeners to this program are in foreign countries like Australia, New Zealand.
John: Is that right?
John: The United Kingdom.
John: And although our neighbors to the north in Canada listen to the program, we share a culture with them.
John: The Canadians have Great Plains.
John: They have cowboys.
John: They have chili.
John: But I wonder if chili, particularly canned chili, is a thing that they have in Canada.
John: Germany or the United Kingdom?
Merlin: That's a good question.
John: People may be listening to this program and scratching their heads and going, they talk about Chile an awful lot.
John: Because, you know, I remember the first time I went to the United Kingdom and I ordered a root beer.
John: This is a long time ago.
John: And nobody knew what I was talking about, and finally some guy leaned over and he was like, listen, mate, he said in an English accent.
John: He said, listen, root beer is a North American thing.
John: We don't have it here.
John: We think it tastes gross.
John: It tastes like medicine.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: I was like, it tastes like medicine.
Merlin: That's tall talk for somebody from the UK.
John: Yeah, root beer is amazing.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: You people don't know what... This is back when you couldn't even get a... You couldn't find a taco in all of Europe.
Yeah.
John: but i was like root beer you got to get hip to root beer and they're like no we've had it we you know there are places that are like you've got to drink american root beer and it's a whole thing it's kind of like you know fish and chips or whatever ink you know like the the weird export and no one in the united kingdom liked it so then fast forward several years i was there on tour
John: And I was staying with a good friend who lives there, and he said, as we're driving back to his house, he was like, listen, mate, I've got a big surprise for you.
John: And I was like, really?
John: Tell me more.
John: And he said, I got you some root beer.
John: I know how much you like it.
John: And I actually was excited.
John: And I got back to his place and he had root beer.
John: And it was honestly called something like American root beer.
John: USA style American root beer.
John: And I drank it and it tasted like medicine.
John: It was terrible.
John: It tasted like cough syrup.
John: Isn't that interesting?
John: They haven't gotten the good stuff.
John: I was like, what is the matter with you guys?
John: You come over to America.
John: I know English people have been to America.
John: You surely have had a Hire's root beer.
John: It's just a simple canned... We can ship it to you if you're too confused.
John: I've never had a decent root beer in Europe in all the years.
Merlin: That's weird.
John: Yeah.
John: And when I talk about it, now maybe that's changed in the last four years and maybe there's been a root beer revolution and everybody that's listening to this podcast that's 25 years old is like, what are you talking about, mate?
John: They love an American root beer.
John: Yeah, root beer.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: We've always had it.
John: But the truth is, no.
John: They have no root beer there.
John: And I can't even imagine what's going on in Australia.
John: They probably flavor it with scorpions or something.
Yeah.
Merlin: When we were in New Zealand, man, that changed the way I think about bacon.
Merlin: Over here, they call what we've got here streaky bacon because their bacon's like ham, and it's good.
Merlin: It's real good.
Merlin: I like Irish bacon, too, but the bacon that I got in New Zealand, when I wasn't eating at McDonald's, where they had the best McDonald's in the world, I was seriously a cut above the McDonald's in New Zealand.
Merlin: Streaky bacon, they call it.
Merlin: They call it streaky bacon.
Merlin: This is the junk we eat here.
Merlin: I go out, and I try to buy the halfway decent bacon, and it's just a big piece of fat.
Merlin: I mean, is that that much higher up the food chain than a wolf chili?
John: In Romania, when you get bacon, it's just fat.
John: It's just the rind.
John: And they eat it kind of...
John: It's like raw-ish.
John: I mean, not really cooked down because if you cook the rind down, you cook it down to nothing.
John: So you'll show up at somebody's house and they'll give you a little appetizer or you go into a restaurant and bacon is on the menu and you order it and it's just the fatty rind that you're meant to kind of sit and chew on.
John: And at one point I was talking to a guy and I said, hey, what's the deal?
John: What's the deal with your bacon?
John: Like if you just move the knife over a little bit, you'll get some meat on there.
John: And he thought about it for a little while and he said...
John: Uh, American pigs have, have meat, uh, on their bacon, but Romanian pigs don't, don't have, they lead like a life of leisure.
John: They don't have meat on their bacon.
John: No, it was the opposite.
John: It was the opposite.
John: He felt, he felt it was, it was clear to me that this guy was a butcher or was a, a poet and not a butcher and did not understand that, you know, that yes, Romanian pigs also had meat, uh,
John: He was expressing a sort of collective inferiority complex of his nation that he was sure that the answer to my question was that Romanian pigs didn't have as much meat because they were lesser pigs.
Merlin: I'll bet that chili – I mean, chili definitely seems like a, what, southwestern regional version, but like of a certain kind of food, like a goulash kind of food that you can get in lots of places.
Merlin: It's a kind of goulash, wouldn't you say?
John: I would.
John: I would.
John: The addition of beans is –
John: is the thing like if you put beans in goulash in hungary they would be i think upset they would be mad that's not canonical i don't know i'm it's going to be interesting to hear i'm sure we're going to get lots of uh replies from our how would people reply to us we don't we don't have an email address you know i suggested to you the the other day that we do a uh reader mail but then we'd have to we'd have to have email
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Here's what I'll do.
Merlin: I will go into the content management system, and I will make it very easy for people to contact you via email.
Merlin: Can you imagine the reader mail that we would get?
Merlin: I mean, people will find a way to contact you no matter what, but when you ask them to contact you, they will surely contact you.
John: I have so many things to ask of our listeners, but I never do.
Merlin: I never do.
John: Partly it's because I feel like... We should do the opposite of listener mail.
John: We should just send them little mail, address them individually.
Merlin: We should just ask rhetorical questions and then answer them.
Merlin: Okay, I pulled up just quickly to close this thread because I got stag.
Merlin: I got the ingredients for stag.
Merlin: I got the ingredients for wolf.
Merlin: And they're both pretty good.
Merlin: The wolf.
Merlin: So – and as we know here in the States, the ingredients go in the order of – how would you describe it?
Merlin: What there's the most of in it.
John: Sure, sure.
Merlin: That's how ingredients work.
Merlin: That's a good thing.
Merlin: There are probably people who don't know that.
Merlin: That's the first ingredient you see is what there is the most of by, I guess, mass.
John: Right.
John: And a lot of times that is sugar or water.
John: Water and sugar.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: High fructose corn syrup.
Merlin: So for the stag chili, number one ingredient, water.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Number two, beef.
Merlin: Number three, tomatoes.
Merlin: Four, beans.
Merlin: Number five, kidney beans.
Merlin: Because I guess those aren't technically beans.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Tomato paste, dehydrated onions.
Merlin: Not too bad.
Merlin: All the way down the line, you end up with bell peppers and spices.
Merlin: Wolf chili.
Merlin: Number one ingredient.
Merlin: Meat ingredients.
Merlin: Paren, beef, pork.
Merlin: Number two, diced tomatoes and juice.
Merlin: Number three, prepared pink beans.
Merlin: beef stock, green bell peppers, tomato puree, onions.
Merlin: I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sad.
Merlin: And then you get less than, then you go down to the less than 2% of, you got soy flour, salt, flavoring sugar.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But you know, first ingredient meat, that's pretty good.
Merlin: That is good.
John: And, uh, it didn't, didn't say eyelashes anywhere on there.
Merlin: That might be in the 2%.
Merlin: But the thing is, while I was waiting for you to finish your activities earlier, I was reading up, looking on Wikipedia and learning about wolf chili.
Merlin: They used to have a Model T. You can go look this up.
Merlin: It's a wonderful, hilarious book.
Merlin: silly wikipedia entry um they had a model t that where they'd made a like a fake can it looked like like like the wienermobile before they have a big can of chili and right behind the big can uh they had a wolf in a cage and they would drive around in a model t with a fake can of chili and a wolf
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: A little bit on the nose, but pretty amusing.
John: That is amusing.
Merlin: Boy, that would knock them dead at a county fair.
Merlin: Can you imagine having to take that on the road, how complicated that would be?
Merlin: You'd have to get gas, maintain the Model T, make sure the can was up to snuff, and then, oh, and by the way, deal with a wolf.
John: You know, the thing about a wolf is, speaking as somebody who's been proximate to some wolves, even wolves in cages, even wolves that are chained to a cement floor,
Merlin: I want to play the D&D module of your life at some point.
John: When you are standing next to a wolf, even a wolf chained to a cement floor in a Cal Worthington Ford auto dealership.
John: The wolf is terrifying.
John: And energies are being communicated to you and your body that are prehistoric.
John: And you know in your adult mind that the wolf cannot get you.
John: But you are never, ever, ever so...
John: aware of being prey.
Merlin: I was going to say, it is like the canonical predator.
Merlin: There's nothing about a wolf that isn't predatory.
John: If you're standing near a bear, like a wild bear...
Merlin: Even if it's chained to a concrete floor.
John: Even if it's chained to a... I mean, if a bear is chained to a concrete floor and he could escape his chains all of a sudden, he would plow through some people, but his main goal would be, like, get out.
Merlin: Right.
John: And I've encountered quite a few bears in nature.
Right.
John: And the bear, unless the bear has no other option, really, they just turn and run.
John: Like they don't, even big bears, they just turn and run.
John: And those bears, you know, the bears that attack people in Alaska, it's almost always a case where somebody is down at a salmon-choked fishing stream and they're plowing through head-high brush and
John: And they, you know, they come in between a bear and something else.
John: And it's just like, even people who are aware of all the dangers, you know, they kind of like, oh, shit, I forgot my toolkit back in the truck.
John: I'll be right back.
John: And they forget their precautions.
John: They don't make enough noise.
John: They don't ring a bell or whatever.
Yeah.
John: And I've run into bears, like, on a trail where it's like, here comes a bear and here comes me.
John: And a porcupine in that situation will stand its ground and force you to move off the trail while the porcupine walks along, right?
John: Like, a porcupine will face you down.
John: But a bear will turn and split.
John: Right.
John: But a wolf...
John: A wolf in a place like that, if it broke its chains, it just gives you the feeling that it would go around and personally shred each person in the place on his way to the door.
Merlin: Wolves feel like a... Imagine if you had an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Terminator, but in a group that could communicate.
Merlin: Wolves seem to always have a plan for maximum destruction.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: They're really scared.
Merlin: They're not trying to get away.
Merlin: I mean, what's amazing is like one glancing blow from a bear could like knock your car over.
Merlin: The heads on those things are enormous.
Merlin: They're so strong, but they just want to get on with their thing.
Merlin: They want to get out of Cal Worthington's Ford dealership and just get back to their honey or whatever, right?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Not a wolf.
Merlin: The wolf is going to take out as many people as he can.
Merlin: He's like a CIA agent.
John: I feel like driving around in a Model T that's shaped like a can of chili, pulling a wolf in a cage.
John: Every time you pull over to get gas, you're going to sit in the cab of that car and you're going to be like...
John: Okay, I'm getting out now, and I'm going to go back and I'm going to put gas in the car, and the wolf is going to be right there, and he's going to be staring at me.
Merlin: John, he's had a lot of time to think.
Merlin: He's had a lot of time to work the angles, to test the tensile strength of the cage, to look at that farcical lock you have with a bread tie holding it on.
John: Yeah, he's sitting in there, and he's just staring at you while you're pumping gas.
John: He's just breathing like...
John: just breathing fumes and he and he's just thinking to himself like one day motherfucker one day one day you're gonna forget to put that lock back on one day you're gonna you're gonna reach in it's like it's like how did Hannibal Lecter do it the guy reached in for the keys or whatever and all of a sudden he's flayed and hanging up in the inside the cage and Hannibal Lecter is wearing his skin
John: And it's just exact.
John: The wolf is thinking that exact same shit.
Merlin: You think he might drive around like he's got a really long game where he would actually learn to drive from having observed.
Merlin: He would wear the skin of the wolf truck driver and go around and just quietly, slowly cause a huge amount of very confusing destruction.
John: Listen, this is historically based.
John: Think about the wolves that literally wear sheep's clothing.
Merlin: They don't literally wish, do they?
John: Yeah.
John: You think that's just some adage?
John: I thought that was an analogy.
John: Didn't you ever see the Bugs Bunny cartoon?
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
Merlin: You know, we watched the first Chronicles of Narnia movie last night, and it rejuvenated my extreme fear of wolves.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They're really scary.
Merlin: And, you know, there's a lot of places you get the coyotes.
Merlin: You get, like, there's coyotes in Golden Gate Park.
John: There's coyotes in my neighborhood.
John: I see them all the time.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Now, what's the difference between a wolf and a coyote?
John: Well, a lot of difference.
John: I mean, a coyote looks like a
John: Looks like a kind of wild dog.
John: It's like a big fox?
John: Yeah, like a big fox.
John: Whenever you see a coyote, there's always like a double-take, triple-take thing where you're like, that's a weird dog.
Merlin: Oh, that could be like an Australian sheepdog or something.
John: Well, yeah.
John: The thing about dogs, as I understand it, is that we've bred them into all these breeds for our peculiar needs and for our friendship and whatever other myths we're telling ourselves about dogs.
John: But if you take...
John: If you take some dogs of every breed, let's say you take a miniature bulldog and a Sharpay and a Great Dane and a Husky and you let them run free and they mate with each other, that first generation of dogs will be pretty weird looking.
John: And then the second generation of dogs will start to look like...
John: All the same kind of, like, general sort of dog.
John: And then by the third generation, they will all have reverted, immediately reverted to that kind of East African dog.
John: If you go online and you Google, like... Oh, like one of those, like, prototypical fucking dogs.
John: Yeah, you Google Ethiopian dog or something, and you're going to get this... Check.
John: Sort of yellow...
John: dog with big ears that's got like kind of long legs and it just looks like a er dog.
John: And if you leave dogs alone and just let them mate with each other and don't monkey with them, it's only a few generations before all that specialized breeding is just wiped out and they're back to er dog.
John: So a coyote is kind of a
Merlin: like to me at least a variation on the ur dog and i think even maybe a little bit smaller than an ethiopian ur dog i found an infographic uh discussing the differences between the wolf and the coyote and it's pretty clear i mean the coyote looks like a big dog yeah it's got the small nose pad narrow snout long ears with pointed tips the wolf you got a large nose pad which is super cute broad snout and the short ears with rounded tips
Merlin: And incredible intelligence behind the eyes.
Merlin: The coyote looks, as they would say, wily, but the wolf looks fucking tough.
John: Very tough and very much bent on planning your destruction.
John: Coyote puts me kind of in the mind of a jackal.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Yeah, that's close to the ur dog.
John: And when I see coyotes in my own neighborhood, I am always like, you know, you do catch your breath and go like, oh, wow, look at that.
Merlin: Well, they move different.
Merlin: Wild animals move differently.
Merlin: There's something really, like the thing is if there's a dog out there, the dog's going to just be acting like a fucking dog and running around being stupid.
Merlin: But you'll see, when you see like a coyote or even a raccoon for that matter, and they freeze and they look at you.
Merlin: And then the way they scurry away is so chilling.
Merlin: So chilling.
John: Yeah, the coyote, when he runs, he has that kind of lope, that like, where they just have a confidence.
John: They have a confidence that is inspiring.
John: And when I go out for late night walks in my neighborhood, late night walks where I expect to be covering some ground so I don't bring a scimitar.
Mm-hmm.
John: I do have my staff, let's call it.
John: My walking staff.
John: And I am mindful because I'm much more worried that some asshole Rottweiler is going to get out.
John: Not that the Rottweiler is an asshole, but some assholes Rottweiler.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Rottweilers are very susceptible.
Merlin: That's the pit bull problem.
Merlin: I mean, proximity to assholes is bad for some dogs.
John: Right.
John: So I'll be walking through this neighborhood, and it's just like, I know that there are some assholes in this neighborhood, and I know that they have Rottweilers or pit bulls.
John: And if one of them gets out and we just have one of these encounters, I need to be prepared to use a combination of my staff –
John: And my wits.
John: And my SAS dagger.
John: Those smoke bombs you can throw down to help you disappear like Batman.
John: To dispatch this dog.
John: But when I think about a coyote, I'm 100% sure that no coyote would ever attack me.
John: But I want to be prepared for like, what if you twist an ankle and fall down a slope?
John: oh and he brings a friend yeah and then there's coyotes around and they're like you know all of a sudden you're late night chilly yeah you can't they can't hear you up on the highway because the cars are too loud and you're down there and your your staff is out of reach you're gonna have to roll a saving throw what the that's right what the hell are you gonna do you know you need to be prepared did i tell you about that cat i told you about this didn't i the cat that we had in our backyard
John: Like an American cat?
Merlin: Well, I have to tell you, well, kind of.
Merlin: I'm kind of fascinated by semi-domestic animals that really probably are kind of a bad idea to have around.
Merlin: I mean, obviously, sometimes it's tragic.
Merlin: It's really tragic what can happen when you get the wrong kind of dog around the wrong kind of people.
Merlin: Think, for example, about how – like I've seen this with my daughter where like big dogs are not freaked out by a child.
Merlin: Little dogs are very freaked out by a child.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know if you've ever seen this, but little dogs are very intimidated by something that's kind of their size.
Merlin: And that's when you get bitten and stuff.
Merlin: Big dogs could give a fuck.
Merlin: You could ride them.
Merlin: They don't care.
Merlin: But no, I think I told you about this.
Merlin: We had this weird situation where suddenly there was this...
Merlin: huge we've been having a lot of crows lately and i'm really trying to keep my cool about it i'm trying to stay inside keep my face where they can't see it i've been kind of worried that they were building a nest in our chimney and my daughter has now started she knows how freaked out i am by crows and she's been provoking me she's been saying look that one recognizes you and i'm like that's not even funny like don't even joke like this is like a phobia for me so wait a minute are you telling me you don't go out and routinely say i see you crow i see you
Merlin: I mean, I feel like the problem is I don't know how much they've seen of me that I'm not even aware of.
Merlin: I don't want to seem duplicitous.
Merlin: So I don't want to be like a Paul Reiser in Aliens kind of guy where they see me as having, you know, the crows call it a two-face.
Merlin: Somebody who on the one hand is respectful and other times is not respectful toward crows.
Merlin: I try to always be respectful, but mainly I stay out of their way.
Merlin: Because first there's no crows.
Merlin: And then suddenly there's lots of crows.
Merlin: There's been a meeting, like a memo went out.
John: Yeah.
John: Yes.
John: I woke up this morning, opened my curtains, looked out the window at the two crows that were having a conversation on the wire out in front of my window.
John: They both turned their attention to me, and I said to each of them in turn, I see you, crow.
John: I see you, crow.
John: And they saw me, and we understand each other.
Merlin: Like respectful, mature predators do.
Merlin: You guys have an understanding.
John: I think you have to do that over and over again because, yeah, the memo does go out, and they know a lot more about you than you would be comfortable.
Merlin: John, there's science about this.
Merlin: There's actual science.
Merlin: I think it's probably true of the raccoons as well.
Merlin: But anyhow, I don't like to talk about it because you never know.
Merlin: I don't want people running around and trying to crow scare me.
Merlin: But there's been a lot of crows at our house.
Merlin: And we come home, I walk my daughter home from school, and there will be six crows just sitting on top of our house where they could very easily be building a nest.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: As long as I'm at this, I might as well just get it all out.
Merlin: About four or five Saturday mornings ago, I remember very specifically, I woke up and I heard... And there's a kind of sound where you go, hmm, that could be far away or close.
Merlin: And there's a kind of sound where you go, oh, I'm hearing that signal directly.
Merlin: That's in the wall.
Merlin: And then I'm hearing the plate reverb version of that come back outside.
Merlin: It's close.
Merlin: The chirp is coming from inside the house.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then, so I'm laying in bed thinking, okay, no big deal, no big deal.
Merlin: And I hear a poof.
Merlin: And I'm like, and then I hear chirp, chirp, chirp.
Merlin: And as God is my witness, I was positive that there was a bird that had gone through our chimney and landed in like where the fire goes part of the chimney.
Merlin: It took me two weeks to have the guts to go look.
Merlin: And yes, there was a dead bird that had come down our chimney.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: And had died in your fireplace.
Merlin: It looked.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, I think it was injured or something.
Merlin: It might have been.
Merlin: I looked at it so quick.
Merlin: I just swiped it into a bag and ran outside screaming.
Merlin: It was the worst.
Merlin: All in the service of saying that we have been menaced by crows for a while and I've known to keep my distance.
Merlin: So long story short, I was at the office and this happened while you and I were recording a podcast actually a few weeks ago.
John: But now wait a minute.
John: The dead bird in the fireplace was not a crow.
Yeah.
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: It was really little.
Merlin: I think it was a baby.
Merlin: So I hope it didn't fall out of a nest up there.
Merlin: But like our chimney just goes straight up.
Merlin: I mean, it's like a Santa type situation.
Merlin: There's not anything in between.
Merlin: So anyway, I get a photo from my wife and she's like, wow, there's a lot of crows outside.
John: This is while we're podcasting.
Merlin: You remember a few podcasts ago, I was kind of distracted.
Merlin: And I told you afterward, this is why.
Merlin: And there were like literally like over a dozen crows swarming in our backyard.
Merlin: I mean, it was something like from the Old Testament.
Merlin: There was a fuck ton of crows and they were squawking and they were mad.
Merlin: So my wife took these photos.
Merlin: She's like, that's crazy.
Merlin: And I'm like, great.
Merlin: You know, trigger warning.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Can you just not send me a bunch of crows in the backyard?
Merlin: Because I know I'm going to come home and there's going to be problems.
Merlin: And then she sent me another photo and she's like...
Merlin: do you see a cat in the tree?
Merlin: And I was like, what, what?
Merlin: And I went and I looked, I was talking to you.
Merlin: I'm trying to have a conversation like I'd grown up with you, but I go and I look and I zoom in my hand to God.
Merlin: There is a cat, a really super funky looking cat in the tree in our backyard that is being menaced by the crows.
Merlin: I get another message.
Merlin: That cat apparently just went fucking hammering tongs on a nest full of baby crows.
Merlin: It has crow guts on its face.
Merlin: It's licking itself and the crows are losing it.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Now, flash forward a little bit.
Merlin: I shared this with the Internet.
Merlin: I said, can you hear some photos?
Merlin: Could you tell me a little bit about this cat?
Merlin: And I found out it's one of these monster cats.
Merlin: It's a cat that's a cross between a wild cat and a domestic cat.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: What kind was it?
Merlin: It's called a Savannah cat.
John: Yes, I know the Savannah cats.
Merlin: Have you ever been around a Savannah cat?
John: I have.
John: I had a friend that had one.
John: They're very freaky cats.
Merlin: They're super freaky, and I got kind of a little bit obsessed with them.
Merlin: They're very tall cats.
Merlin: Because the first thing that freaked me out about it was that it climbed up a tree.
Merlin: It climbed up a tree and was pretty calm about it.
Merlin: It was just okay being in a tree and being photographed.
Merlin: And then it ate some crows, and then you know what it did?
Merlin: It went down the tree.
Merlin: It didn't eat a fireman.
Merlin: It was fine.
Merlin: It's like a fucking jungle cat.
Merlin: It climbed down the tree.
John: You have a wild savannah cat in your backyard who is eating birds, let's say.
Merlin: Just when it feels like it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so I went out and asked the internet about this, and we got it narrowed down to either a Bengal cat or a savannah cat or possibly this other kind.
Merlin: But I'm pretty positive it's a savannah cat, which is like a cross between, how do you say it, a servile?
John: Yeah, a serval.
Merlin: A serval and like a domestic cat.
Merlin: And now you ready for this?
Merlin: You know what they cost?
Merlin: $2,000 to $38,000.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: No, they're a big, they're a prize.
John: They're like a, they're a Kanye, Kanye type of thing.
Merlin: Like a Kanye pet.
Merlin: And here's the other thing, as I got more obsessed and kept looking at this, and now I think this is a worthy adversary for the crows, because here's the thing about a $38,000 house cat, is it, well, it knows its name, and it will come when it is called, and turns out you can walk it on a leash.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Yeah, no, I know these cats.
John: You know, the first time I was in Telluride, Colorado, there was a woman there just calmly as can be walking down the street with a mountain lion on a leash.
Merlin: Oh, Telluride.
John: And that was a real eye-opener.
Merlin: How big?
Merlin: I mean, did it really read as?
John: It's a fucking mountain lion.
John: It's as big as a golden retriever.
Merlin: How domestic can you make a mountain lion?
John: Not at all.
John: I can't imagine it was domesticated.
John: But this was one of these women that was wearing like a Navajo coat and a wide brim like Outback style hat with a bunch of buckles on it.
John: And so she had, obviously, a pretty high opinion of herself.
John: And she had a mountain lion on a leash.
John: And I crossed to the other side of the street.
John: I was like, as you do, the sidewalks are yours.
John: And she was kind of a legendary character, I guess, in Telluride for a while.
John: But yeah, these cats... That's extremely colorful, John.
John: Tell you what.
John: But as you move higher up the cat...
John: ladder you get some smart ass cats um but i wouldn't trust a cat i mean a cat those long-legged cats like the first word that i do not want to use in describing a cat is tall i don't i don't want to hear about a tall cat i don't want to see a tall cat and those cats you know they walk in and they've got coyote legs
Merlin: Oh, the thing is, these animals, it's like we were describing with the crows or the raccoons or whatever.
Merlin: You can tell when an animal is a domestic animal.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Because it looks stupid and it looks like it wants to make you happy for no particular reason.
Merlin: Or it looks loggy.
Merlin: You can see the dull-wittedness in it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, you pull out the laser pointer or your funny little mouse on all magic wand to make it entertain you for a while.
Merlin: Here's the thing that I understand.
Merlin: This is everything I know about cats, basically in a sense, is that the way that we have cats in our house that don't kill us, first chance they get, is that we keep them infantilized.
Merlin: You keep a cat, a kitten.
Merlin: If you never let a kitten get beyond kitten-ness, it will mostly be okay and not kill you in your sleep.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And if you get an outdoor cat, it can burn off a lot of that wild animal energy.
Merlin: And then, you know, it brings home a rat and stuff like that.
Merlin: But mostly that's that's with cats and dogs.
Merlin: It's a combination of breeding and then continuing to treat them like somebody who always knows where their next meal is coming from and never has any challenges like that.
John: Although this fat golden cat that has been living in my backyard for the last couple of years has a kind of outdoor cat savvy.
John: And I've told you about the possum that's living under my house now, haven't I?
Merlin: I didn't want to bring it up.
Merlin: You mentioned it on Twitter and I was immediately terrified for everyone involved.
John: There's a possum living under my house and I'm not 100% thrilled about it.
John: And the other day I was lying in bed and I heard the possum in the wall.
John: And I was like, okay.
John: All right.
John: We got to get you found a way in.
John: He did.
John: And I'm like, we got to get you out of here.
John: And I and I want to.
John: So I went online and I looked and there are all kinds of like possum protection societies who say things like don't hurt the possum or scare it or even trap it or anything.
John: You just want to lead the possum out.
John: You want to wait until the possum comes out, which it will surely do at night.
John: And then in the middle of the night, you should go out and seal up all the entrances to your house under the house where the possum gets in.
John: And then the possum will just find somewhere else to be.
Merlin: That sounds to me like somebody who came up with that and has never actually tried it.
John: That's their theory anyway.
Merlin: That's their theory.
John: But what I discovered was that cats...
John: outdoor cats that have some natural savvy and possums have a kind of professional courtesy for one another and they will eat out of the same bowl at the same time and when they encounter each other in the wild or in the backyard the wild of my backyard they just like tip their hats to one another and say counselor counselor
Merlin: They're like spooks.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like operatives.
Merlin: Operatives, right.
Merlin: They know they need to not cause dust up and have a big mix-em-up out here in the yard.
Merlin: We need to keep things mellow.
John: Yeah, they got projects.
Merlin: Professional courtesy.
John: The cat is trying to eat maybe, let's say, moles and shrews.
John: And the possum is trying to eat crickets and slugs and maybe also shrews.
John: I mean, you know, I think there's a little bit of overlap.
Yeah.
John: But anyway, so when I realized the possum was going in and out of this hole under my house, I, of course, turned off all the lights and sat in a chair.
Merlin: With your staff in your life?
John: Facing the hole.
John: With some night goggles?
John: No, I let my eyes accustomed to the dark.
Merlin: Honestly, were you outside?
Merlin: Did you sit on the porch?
John: Well, the first night, I sat where I could look through a glass door at the hole.
John: And then the second night, I opened the door so that I had a clear view.
John: I was still sitting inside, but I was sitting in the dark facing the hole through the open door.
John: Until a friend came and they were like, are you just trying to get the possum to come in the house?
John: And I was like, no, I feel like if the possum like entered the house, I would stand up and make it aware of me.
John: But anyway, so I'm sitting, I'm watching the hole and then, so I'm being quiet.
John: Along comes the fat cat that lives in my backyard.
John: The cat sets up station station.
John: Sitting on a picnic bench outside.
John: And the cat sits down on the picnic bench and is staring at the hole too.
John: What?
John: And I'm like... So we sit there in silence.
John: The cat is not aware that I'm there.
John: We sit there for like 10 minutes.
John: And I'm staring at this cat.
John: And the cat is staring at the possum hole.
John: And we're waiting.
John: We're waiting for the freaking thing to arrive.
John: And I feel like...
John: I was offended because I've been a generous host to this cat.
John: I've allowed him to sit in my backyard.
John: I've never once gotten the wrist rocket out and sent a marble up his butt.
John: And now here he is.
John: He's just waiting for his friend to show up.
Merlin: He's being perfidious.
Merlin: He should be more loyal to you.
Merlin: Do you think he's in league with the possum?
John: I feel like the cat should have kept the possum from living under the house.
Merlin: He should just casually menace the possum enough to make it inconvenient to live under your house.
Merlin: He should just be fucking around going through the nest or something.
Merlin: Maybe turn his stuff up and down and eat the possum's chili or something.
Merlin: Mess with him a little bit.
John: Exactly.
John: I've been host to this cat.
John: Every time I see him in the yard, I coo to him and I say, good job.
Merlin: This is why we got cats originally, John.
Merlin: Isn't it?
John: This is why we got them.
John: When I first bought the house, the people that lived in the house before me had allowed rats to invade the roof.
John: And so when I first bought the house, one of the first things I had to do was put on a hazmat suit and go up into the attic with a shop vac, the loudest thing that man has ever invented.
John: A shop vac is louder than an F-15.
John: And I'm in a hot and sweaty crawl space with a hazmat suit on and a shop vac.
John: And I am shop vac-ing up all of the rat detritus.
John: And I got like 25 bags of insulation out of the roof of my house that I felt had been contaminated by rats.
John: Oh, by their pellets?
Yeah.
John: Yeah, and their rat urine and their rat eyelashes.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: And they probably trim their nails up there.
John: All that stuff that ends up in Chile and other countries.
John: Insulation.
John: 25 bags of insulation and rat junk that I put out by the curb.
John: Word to the wise, the garbage man came by.
John: I'm standing there next to this stuff.
John: The garbage man shows up.
John: I was like, hey, guy, I got a little bit over the one can, one bag limit here.
John: I got 25 bags full of this garbage.
John: What do we got to do?
John: How do we work this out?
John: And the garbage man said, you got 20 bucks?
John: I was like, I got 20 bucks.
John: That's a really good deal.
John: It was an amazing deal.
John: And I gave him 20 bucks and he didn't even want me to huck him in the, he was like, I got it.
John: And then the garbage went away.
Wow.
John: So this whole business now, if you go and you read the manual, it says, like, every extra bag over your one bag is $20 or something like that.
John: I was looking at $600 when all was said and done to take this stuff to the dump or whatever.
Merlin: Without mentioning, oh, by the way, there's hazmat stuff in here.
John: And this is totally gross stuff.
John: But, I mean, he's a garbage man.
John: He's like, yeah, it's all gross stuff.
John: I don't want to look at anybody's garbage except if it's full of, like, vintage.
John: Barabons.
John: Barabons.
John: Vintage Barrett Bonds, or I had a friend who was a garbage man, actually, for a while, and he said that the old garbage men, like the guys that have been doing it for a long time, they all had photo albums full of homemade porn.
John: And it's a garbage man thing that you're looking for Polaroids of people, or you used to at least, be looking for Polaroids of people in there all together doing weird things.
John: Because before digital cameras, the only way you could do it... Because you wouldn't have to have it processed.
John: Wouldn't have to have it processed.
Merlin: You could make... It's nice to know that one of the things that all of us really secretly, deeply fear in our hearts is actually worse than we thought.
Ha ha!
Merlin: People do want your amateur porn, and they're garbage men who go through garbage to get it and then go home.
John: And the thing is, out there somewhere, there are all these 65-year-old garbage men, and they all have somewhere in their crawlspace multiple photo albums full of what is essentially the history of Polaroid porn.
John: The history of homemade... It should be in the Library of fucking Congress, this stuff.
Merlin: Oh, where's the Ken Burns for Polaroid porn?
John: Yeah, but no one has ever... No one is even aware that it exists, and no one has gone around and surveyed all the old garbage men around the country and said, listen, we know you've got some freaky shit.
John: We'd like it all in one place at the Museo de Garbage Men.
John: And come on, come out of the woodwork.
John: Like, let's have a festival.
John: You know what you could do?
Merlin: You could do one of those public radio kind of things where they're always trying to say, hey, if you're done with your car or if you're about to die, leave us some stuff.
Merlin: The vintage Polaroid Museo could just say anonymously, listen, we don't care.
Merlin: We don't care who it came from.
Merlin: We just want a zip code and we want the porn.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And they would come and they, wait a minute.
Merlin: Value added, they will clean the porn out after you die.
Merlin: So when you die, your family will not have to see all of your horrible porn.
Merlin: Your family will never know.
Merlin: Your family doesn't need to know.
Merlin: You should die an honorable man.
Merlin: And in this case, it's a service where you get a dedicated, maybe a bonded agent, somebody who you can trust to get all of.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: Here's the value add.
Merlin: If you've got retail German dungeon porn, we will take care of that too.
John: But the thing is, it's got to be it's got to be annotated like like the porn has to be annotated.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: And so we need an army of interns.
John: But of course, the intern laws have changed.
John: So we'd have to we'd have to get a grant of some kind to pay for them.
John: But they need to they need to be cataloging and scanning this in.
John: Think of the resource.
John: That a website with all the garbage man porn from around the world.
John: Wait a minute.
John: Think about the porn that German garbage men have.
Merlin: Literally covered with shit.
John: Think about that.
John: Think about the photo albums that garbage men who were.
Merlin: Just from stuff in the background.
Merlin: Just from stuff like, you know, I'm not super into porn, but I do love looking at the backgrounds.
Merlin: And I think you could learn so much about the history of a society from where naked people sat still for a while.
John: Yeah, their shoes, the televisions in the background, all of the... I mean, you know, like out the window, you see the Berlin Wall coming down.
John: Like there's a lot of... There's a lot of history.
John: There's a lot of history that's just being...
John: That's just being wasted, squandered.
John: Those guys are dying.
John: Their wives are finding that stuff.
John: They're going, ew, gross, and they're throwing them into the garbage.
John: But modern garbage men are probably not searching the garbage for porn like old garbage men did.
Merlin: There's a terrible, terrible independent film in this somewhere.
Merlin: But it is going away.
Merlin: And the thing is, you want to give these people their anonymity.
Merlin: You want to give them maybe a code name.
Merlin: But it would be nice to know, see, this is the trouble with big data, is you probably will eventually be able to figure out that, oh, it was Carl that was keeping all these photos.
John: Right.
John: They have to start dying.
John: And I think that garbage men probably, a lot of them die young because they're like sucking on rat dung for lives.
Merlin: It's hard work.
Merlin: Oh my gosh, that's miserable.
Merlin: So I've captured that here, that we need to have some kind of a museo for that.
Merlin: So you went up into, you're wearing a hazmat suit, and you got a shop vac.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: So I cleaned out the house.
John: And I feel like, so I made the house rat-proof.
John: For the most part at the time.
John: Rat resistant.
John: Rat resistant.
John: And I added to the mix a couple of cats.
John: My dad's cat, Puppy, was living with me at the time.
John: And Puppy was a long-haired white cat who actually was a ferocious ratter.
Yeah.
John: and then i had my young cat lewis who was learning how to rat from puppy and you know we cleaned out all the rat stuff but then there were some rats that still thought that this was their turf or whatever and so the two cats then really cleaned up dodge city and
John: And there were no rats around.
John: I mean, for about six months there, seven years ago, I would see some dead rats out in the street.
John: And I think that puppy didn't even allow rats to die on my property.
John: Oh.
Merlin: Puppy, like, was... The job's not done until the rat's off the property.
John: That's right.
John: Um...
John: So then no rats.
John: No rats for years and years and years.
John: And Puppy is gone and Lewis is gone.
John: But this red cat, I feel like, has inherited the responsibility.
John: And then I saw this hole under the house.
John: And it had been a hole before that I had filled.
John: But it's a new hole.
John: And it was a big hole, bigger than a rat.
John: And I thought that the red cat was using the hole.
John: And I actually saw the red cat go in the hole one time.
John: So I was like, okay, this is a cat hole.
John: And he's making a famous cat hole.
Merlin: Like the kind of place where in young children's fiction where a cat might go to have kittens.
John: Yeah, the cat's under the house.
John: The cat is taking care of it.
John: I mean, I don't mind a cat under the house as long as it's not climbing the walls or peeing on everything.
Mm-hmm.
John: Now it turns out it's a possum hole and the cat is sitting out in the backyard watching the possum hole with me.
John: And eventually, before the possum arrived this particular night, I couldn't keep it inside anymore.
John: And I said, hey, and the cat, you know, startled, looks over at me and I'm like, what the fuck?
John: Like, seriously, what are you doing?
John: I put a lot of trust in you and the cat is like really eyeballing me now.
John: Because he's a little freaked out.
John: Cats don't like that.
John: They don't like being confronted like that.
John: Yeah, when you're sitting staring at a hole with them for 15 minutes and they're not aware you're there.
John: And so I gave him a good talking to.
John: Like, you know, I entrust you to keep marsupials out of the basements and
John: And and now you're just sitting here like waiting for him to show up and you guys are going to get a milkshake or something.
John: And eventually the cat like couldn't take it, couldn't take the heat and and split.
John: And I never did see the possum that night.
Merlin: So it's really seems like he might be working with him.
Merlin: I mean, I don't want to I don't want to say because that's not that's not an unkind thing to say about a yard cat.
Merlin: But it kind of feels like he might have been like like maybe that possum's the boss now.
John: I'm a little bit worried about that.
John: I'm a little bit worried about exactly that.
John: And I don't want – like top dog in my backyard is not a possum.
John: It's a cat.
John: Well, it's not a cat anymore.
John: The cat's been demoted.
Merlin: John, you should look into the Savannah – the Savannah cat – I'm sorry.
Merlin: I misspoke.
Merlin: It's up to $1,800 to $22,000 is what it costs.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And here's the thing is there's options, and they are rated F1, F2, F3 through F5, depending on what percentage of serval they have.
John: Are they like tornadoes where F5 is the best, or are they like car racing where F1 is the best?
Merlin: No, it's like DEFCONs.
Merlin: It's like DEFCONs.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: Yeah, everybody gets it backwards.
Merlin: If you get an F1, you get yourself an F1.
Merlin: Now, I'm not going to lie to you.
Merlin: This is not going to be cheap.
Merlin: You get yourself an F1, and you're guaranteed a Savannah Cat that is over 53% serval.
Ooh.
John: And it's a breeder, right?
John: You're not going to pay $22,000 for a cat that can't.
Merlin: I think you'd want some papers and provenance to know.
Merlin: But you're looking at a cat that might be around 30 pounds.
Merlin: It's long-legged.
Merlin: It's adapted.
Merlin: It can get along with children.
John: My cat is 30 pounds.
Merlin: Wow.
Wow.
Merlin: But you can walk around on a leash.
Merlin: Well, here's what you're looking at.
Merlin: You're looking at, and this seems like quite a spread.
Merlin: I'm at a1savannas.com here, so I haven't vetted these numbers.
Merlin: For an F1 male, you're looking at $12,000 to $22,000.
Merlin: For an F1 female, you're looking at $12,000 to $35,000.
Merlin: Because then I guess you could breed them.
Merlin: But I think – I just want to say I think that picture changes.
Merlin: If you're walking around at night with a half-wild animal while you're carrying a staff, I think there's going to be some changes in the way those animals look at you.
Merlin: They're going to say you're serious.
Merlin: First of all, you've demonstrated that you can get along with a half-wild animal already and get it on a leash.
John: Yeah.
John: The thing is in my neighborhood, if I start walking around with a long-legged cat, like basically a tall cat on a leash.
John: Yeah.
John: I had better also be wearing a fur Homburg.
John: I'm not going to just walk around.
Merlin: Are you saying it would be culturally insensitive to be a white indie rock guy walking around with a cat?
John: I'm not going to have a tall cat on a leash and just be wearing some Filson jacket.
John: That looks pretentious.
John: Yeah, you've got to be repping a certain lifestyle.
John: And a Fur Homburg is the minimum of how fly you would have to be to be pulling off a tall cat.
Merlin: Okay, here's the other thing.
Merlin: Let's for a moment set aside the price of getting an F1 Savannah cat.
Merlin: I think this changes completely if you have two of them.
Merlin: We call it going San Francisco.
Merlin: What if you had two Savannah cats on leashes walking around with you?
John: Oh my god, it would be worth the $50,000 because you would be legendary.
John: You have two incredibly weird, expensive cats that act like dogs.
John: I would need an ankle-length fur coat.
John: A fur Homburg, two Savannah cats on a leash, and like a diamond-tipped walking stick sword cane.
John: You would be like a magic user.
John: That would be a good look.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: That would be dynamite.
John: Seattle would not be big enough to hold me.
John: And the problem is you couldn't rock that look in a place like Los Angeles.
John: You would have to move to like Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Yeah.
John: If you're going to wear an ankle-length fur coat and have two Savannah cats on a leash, you're going to need to live in a resort town.
John: Telluride, Jackson Hole, you know, like at the outside veil.
Merlin: I guess so.
Merlin: I guess I'm thinking now I'm thinking in comics.
Merlin: I think of things in comics like Saga or The Watchman.
Merlin: There's a great tradition of scary dudes with giant fucking cats.
Merlin: Like what's his name in The Watchmen?
Merlin: He's got a giant, giant, giant cat.
Merlin: The cat's like a lap cat, right?
Merlin: No, his cat, it's really, really, really big.
Merlin: It's an artificially – here's what I'm saying, John.
Merlin: I'm not saying you should become a supervillain.
Merlin: I think – I'm not saying you should be perceived as a supervillain.
Merlin: But I think you're going to get a lot of respect from other –
John: reprobates if you if you have the described costume and two very large cats i think so too but i mean i really i i'm i'm increasingly concerned about like like this is the thing sometimes sometimes in my neighborhood i you'll go by somebody's house and they will have a really expensive car and the house is yeah nothing yeah and you go like right okay so when you're in the car and you're rolling around
John: you're repping a certain high style.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But you better not ever bring anybody home.
John: It's like you've put all your ducks in one car basket.
John: In one car basket.
John: And...
John: I feel like everything that you rep at every level has to be co-measured with all the other things that you're repping.
John: You can't be off the scale in one department and then let everything slack.
Merlin: Ah, that makes sense.
Merlin: It's a kind of bizarre personality compartmentalization.
Merlin: You don't want to have to have this one thing you hope everybody looks at, and then, oh, by the way, don't look at all of this over here.
John: Right.
John: That makes sense.
John: If you come into my house, and you're like, huh, this guy is kind of a weird collector of things, and he's not all the way to... If you go into Amy Mann's house...
John: Going up the stairs, there are 25 Santa Claus dolls from the 19th century that are all made of bone china and super creepy.
John: And it's like, right, I'm in Michael Penn and Amy Mann's house.
John: Of course there are creepy Santas everywhere.
John: And if you say something like I just happened, and, you know, in the kitchen there are a bunch of paintings of U.S.
John: presidents.
John: And if you comment on them, you realize that, oh, Amy has painted all of those.
John: Wow.
John: And she's very good.
John: And she just picks a president and paints the president.
John: And then it goes up on the kitchen wall.
John: It's like, right, these people are living a very, very high level of meeting expectations.
John: Like, I'm going to Amy Mann's house and Michael Penn's house.
John: What's it going to be like?
John: I hope it's not a tract house out in Pasadena.
John: Right.
John: And then you realize that, no, it is a Tudor home and it is full of, I said to them at one point, I was like, you know, the only thing that this house is missing are some like Napoleon hats.
John: Like you need some feathered Napoleon hats.
John: And Michael Penn stands up, grabs my hand, leads me into the next room and points up to the top of the bookshelf where there are 10 feathered Napoleon hats.
John: Okay.
John: And I was just like, well, okay then.
John: I'll see myself out.
John: Game, set, match, right?
John: Like they are living commensurate with your expectations.
John: They do not disappoint.
John: And if you come into my house and you look around, you know, there are no – I have just not lived long enough or vibrantly enough to have 10 Napoleon hats.
Yeah.
John: But they're definitely like, if you see the things that are in my house and then you think to yourself, I hope that the person that owns these things has some opinions about things.
John: I would hate it if this guy just had no opinions about anything.
John: Then you will find that the opinions I have about things match
John: the number of kooky, uh, kooky globes that are under my piano.
Merlin: This is not so different from going back a few episodes, going back to the guy who puts all the meat stickers in his, in his diary.
Merlin: Like you don't want to become, you don't want to become like an intellectual fetishist or a cultural fetishist.
Merlin: You don't want to become just the one person who like is covered with tattoos.
Merlin: Like, eh, it's not that interesting, right?
Merlin: You don't want to become the one person who just has a room in their house dedicated to Elvis.
Merlin: Like that doesn't seem well-rounded.
Merlin: It doesn't seem actually all that interesting and artistic.
John: A bunch of salt shakers that look like owls, for instance.
Merlin: Well, I mean, it'd be nice to have, but you're saying there should be a leveling among all your quirkiness that supports a larger personality.
John: Well, you remember the story I told about the guy that had a bunch of tattoos, and then we were going on a beer run, and we went out to his car, and it was a two-wheel drive Toyota pickup, and I was like...
John: You're repping a whole thing here that the absolute minimum car I was expecting you to drive would be a 72 El Camino.
Merlin: Oh, right.
John: Okay.
John: But I really expected a 65 GTO.
John: This is the kind of thing your dad would give you when you go to college.
John: Yeah, and you're telling me this is a two-wheel drive Toyota King Cab pickup?
John: Like, no, sir.
John: No, sir.
John: Shame, shame, shame.
John: So, yeah, I don't feel like if you have crossed checkered flags on a circle of fire tattooed on your forearm, you don't drive a Toyota of any kind.
John: It just doesn't square.
John: And I feel like each of us have to measure the degree of commitment that we have to who we are and then make sure that everything lines up, right?
Merlin: Yeah, it's true.
Merlin: Also, you have to wonder about any solution or perceived solution to a problem that involves adding more animals.
Merlin: Because I think that doesn't always end well.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: You know, it'd be one thing to say like you could borrow like a litter of vicious cats for a little while, but you don't have to be taking care of those cats because then the dander gets into your system and pretty soon you're not thinking straight.
John: And this is where I feel like the chinchilla is the real hack.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I'm listening.
John: The chinchilla is the super hack because A, a chinchilla is hypoallergenic.
Merlin: Oh, look at that little face.
John: A chinchilla does not have dander.
John: It's not an allergic animal.
Merlin: It looks kind of like a small rabbit that's actually a mouse.
John: Right.
John: It's a small rabbit that's actually a mouse.
John: That's exactly right.
Merlin: And it's very fuzzy.
Merlin: It's very fuzzy.
Merlin: It's got short, manageable hair.
John: It's so soft because what is the nicest fur jacket you can buy?
John: It's a chinchilla.
John: And this is a live one of those.
John: They are incredibly chill little dudes, easy to own, not expensive to own, easy to care for, and yet it's a chinchilla.
John: It's not like a guinea pig or a mouse or something.
John: So it reps, it fights at a much higher weight than
John: Because it's technically an exotic thing.
John: So you can be a kook, own a chinchilla, but the chinchilla itself is like very manageable.
John: The word isn't out on chinchilla ownership, I think.
Merlin: These are amazing.
Merlin: I mean, especially if you get a really big one.
Merlin: You kind of need if you had an improbably large because you would get a lot of people going, what is that?
John: What the fuck is this little rabbit mouse?
Merlin: At first, it kind of looks like a rat.
Merlin: It kind of looks like a guinea pig.
Merlin: It kind of looks like a bunny.
Merlin: It kind of looks like a mouse.
Merlin: And if it was really and probably big, that would be super fun.
John: The thing is, then you put it in your arms, and it has that softness...
John: Where it's like improbably soft.
John: Like you cannot maintain a bad mood while you're holding a chinchilla.
John: And you're never going to sneeze either.
John: Like it's the best of all possible worlds.
John: I feel like the chinchilla.
John: Now imagine walking down the street with a couple of big chinchillas on a leash.
Merlin: I like the look of that.
Merlin: They've got pretty small legs.
Merlin: They do.
Merlin: I mean, it wouldn't be a long walk.
Merlin: I like the idea of you just carrying it, though.
Merlin: Again, like a supervillain, just gently petting your chinchilla.
Merlin: In a white suit.
Merlin: But you're going to want an extra hand for your staff is the problem.
John: I don't know.
John: I feel like if you had a chinchilla, what you would be doing is you'd be sitting behind a desk in a big chair in a darkened room, and you'd just be petting a chinchilla.
Yeah.
John: And people would be coming and asking you for favors on the day of your daughter's wedding.