Ep. 138: "MSG Denier"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: This month, they asked Molly Lewis to help me say hi to John.
John Roderick.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: Oh, I'm fine.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm full of sushi.
Merlin: Full of sushi.
Merlin: You went out for a big lunch?
John: I had a big lunch.
John: It's a little rainy, misty in Seattle, and I've been trying to walk a little bit more.
John: I used to be somebody who walked all over.
John: You were famous for walking.
John: I was Mr. Walk Everywhere guy, they used to call me.
John: It's hard to fit it on a shirt.
John: Right.
John: And now I don't.
John: And I feel like it's having a profound effect on my life to go this many years without walking everywhere.
John: So I'm trying to walk everywhere again.
John: And it's interesting how many encounters I have with other human beings walking around.
Merlin: You're telling me that when you leave an area where you're seated and not walking, you will not only see, you will experience, and you will often interact with other people.
John: That's absolutely right.
John: I am seeing and interacting with other people, and they're saying things to me, and I'm saying things back to them.
John: Because I live in the city, people are shaking their cups full of pennies at me, and I'm having encounters with them.
John: I'm tipping my hat to people.
John: I'm bumping into people in the streets.
John: I'm seeing old friends.
John: It's really great.
John: I bumped into a guy the other night.
John: He was coming out of Target, and I caught a glimpse in his bag, and I started commenting on the things that he bought in the middle of the night.
John: And that's not a thing you're going to get when you're sitting at home, just commenting on people's Facebook page.
John: That's a sign you're definitely not lonely.
John: Right?
John: Unless the guy, unless the guy, hey, you got some stuff there.
John: Unless you got some stuff.
John: If he takes a picture of what's in his Target bag and puts it on his Facebook page, then yeah, sure, you comment on it.
John: I was talking about his daily carry.
John: I was doing that right in the room, right in the world.
John: I was like, I wasn't in a room.
John: That's the crazy thing.
John: Wait a minute.
Merlin: I was out on the street.
John: It was like real life comments were enabled.
John: That's right.
John: I was like, hey, it looks like you got a fiber one bar there.
John: You got some toothpaste.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: You're shopping for these things at 1 o'clock in the morning.
John: He was like, well, I was downtown.
John: Target was open.
John: It was great.
John: I mean, it was amazing.
John: Just like the old days.
John: Oh, God.
John: Do you remember the old days?
John: But you know what?
John: There wasn't a Target downtown in the old days.
John: No, sir.
John: No.
John: No.
John: So you got to take the good with the bad.
John: You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Merlin: No, sir.
Merlin: I love Target.
Merlin: Do you?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I like Target.
Merlin: I mean, the mall is hard on me.
Merlin: I'm not good with the mall.
Merlin: But I enjoy Target.
Merlin: And there's a Target in this big downtown super center where my daughter and I go to the movies a lot.
Merlin: Oh, super center.
Merlin: It's a big super center called the Metreon.
Merlin: And that's kind of part of our journey is we always stop by Target.
Merlin: They got food there.
Merlin: They got food.
Merlin: They have Christmas supplies.
Merlin: They got chocolate bars, superhero t-shirts.
John: You got a spatula there.
Merlin: You got a spatula.
Merlin: Yeah, and we buy our candy from the movies there.
Merlin: Don't tell anybody.
John: Oh, that's a little bit of a life hack.
Merlin: That's a huge life hack.
John: Here's my problem with Target, though.
John: All the little boy clothes, pretty cute and cool.
John: Motorcycles, skulls and crossbones, Minecraft.
John: Then you go over to the little girl clothes.
John: And it's just waitress outfits from the pantyhose junction.
Merlin: Very undiverse.
Merlin: There are not many options.
Merlin: There's a lot of like, you know what it is?
Merlin: I think it's a place to go and shop for a niece you don't really like.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: I buy my daughter a lot of boys clothes there.
Merlin: They got cool superhero shirts and stuff.
Merlin: But there's not that much that she finds attractive there.
Merlin: They have more like dress up princess clothes than actual little girl clothes.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Dress up princess clothes.
John: That's exactly what I'm talking about.
John: I think that we've reached peak princess in this culture.
Merlin: And I am ready to start... All of the princess that could be easily gotten out of the ground, we've reached that point.
Merlin: More than 50%.
Merlin: It's like Kunstler says.
Merlin: From now on, it's only going to be in shale.
Merlin: We're going to need princess fracking.
John: That's right.
John: And I feel like you take any more princess out of the ground, and we're going to start having cave-ins.
John: You're going to start getting sinkholes...
John: Princess singles.
John: You know, and that's damaging to the whole economy because people lose faith.
John: They lose faith in solidity of the ground.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, if you don't have that, there's no point.
Merlin: Are you saying you think it's as popular as it's going to get?
Merlin: Do you think we have truly, like, we're not going to see it get bigger?
John: This is what I don't know.
John: I don't know because I cannot...
John: Like, I've talked about this on the program before.
John: I have a little girl.
John: She likes pink princess crap.
John: And I understand that Disney has figured it out.
John: They have figured out just the right amount to inflate the eyeball.
John: so that it looks somewhere between a baby doll and a gray.
John: Right?
John: Like, the eyeball is too big.
John: If real human beings had eyeballs that big, they would be horrifying.
John: But on these little princesses... It'd be very vulnerable.
Merlin: Half of their face would be eyeballs.
John: Yeah, right.
John: That's exactly right.
John: You would not want to go into battle that way.
Merlin: They don't have the kind of brow structure that would protect them from a playground ball or something.
Merlin: It just explodes like a caviar.
John: Just a raindrop.
John: That's right.
John: The surface tension alone on those eyeballs is unsustainable.
John: So I appreciate why it's happening.
John: There's no part of me that feels like that it's part of a grander conspiracy.
John: I think it's one of those small-level conspiracies where people are making money off of it, and they're tapping this pent-up desire, which is just crazy, this desire for pink, poofy, frilly stuff, which just seemed to be in my daughter from the day she was born.
John: And yet, I don't think there's room for any more princesses in the world.
John: Like, first of all, Merlin, I do not think that a princess would make a very good driver.
Merlin: She's not dressed for it.
Merlin: Can you tell me why you think that?
John: Well, would you like to be behind a princess on a highway?
John: I mean, she's a princess.
John: Is she wearing those shoes?
John: Well, probably, yeah.
John: And she's definitely not thinking about...
John: other drivers she's thinking about her princess shit her high level like she's got balls to have and slippers to lose and pumpkins to get in and stuff i mean i don't know what all the new princesses are doing i think it's i think it's it's a there's a tradition you also got a tiara and i think anytime you wear any kind of a tall hat in a car it's going to be distracting
John: So princesses aren't going to be very good drivers.
John: I wouldn't want to be behind a princess in line at a store or in a restaurant.
John: I wouldn't want to have a princess be my server or get on an airplane and there's a princess there.
John: I wouldn't want to be on an airplane with a princess full stop.
John: So what I'm saying is as we get more and more princesses, there are fewer and fewer public spaces that I would want to share with a princess.
John: And so where are all these princesses going to go?
Merlin: well yeah i you could i mean you know i haven't met that many princesses one thing that's interesting is uh that seems unsustainable but it's interesting and weird is that for so long like when when we were kids and even before that the whole narrative of princesses was about being rescued by a dude and that's still like maybe a subtext but that's not nearly as prominent a story as it used to be it is a lot more about just wearing pink and purple
John: Well, and also like magic, right?
John: Magic happens to princesses.
John: I think magic happens to princesses.
John: Yeah, so there's magic.
John: You're not being rescued anymore, but even if you're an empowered princess, it's not like princesses are laboring at the wheel.
John: Well, unless it's Rumble Stiltskin.
John: Oh, right.
John: Was she a princess?
Merlin: She was literally laboring at a wheel, if memory serves.
John: She was, right?
John: But, I mean, was she a princess?
John: I don't remember the original origin story.
Merlin: Was she a woodcutter's daughter or a cobbler's wife or something?
Merlin: Not a wife.
Merlin: She wasn't a wife.
Merlin: She was a daughter.
Merlin: Does he jump around and then turn inside out?
Merlin: Rumpelstiltskin?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Doesn't he do a little hoppy dance and then turn inside out for no particular reason?
Merlin: He does have a dance.
Merlin: No, he splits himself in two.
Merlin: That's it, right?
Merlin: He splits himself in two.
Merlin: Gross.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure.
Merlin: I'm going to need to look this up.
Merlin: So then there are two Rumpelstiltskins or there are two half Rumpelstiltskins?
Merlin: terrible fairy tale it's not even like a good cautionary tale it's got all of the worst habits of fairy tales in one like it's really long it takes a long time to tell a really fucking obvious story and then at the end there's an unexpected twist that makes no sense and has nothing to do with the rest of the story and he splits himself in half I think that's right I'm gonna have to look that up
John: I feel like that's a little bit of Cut the Baby in Two, one of my favorite Joe Pernice songs.
Merlin: Cut the Baby, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, that guy's great.
Merlin: You like that guy, huh?
Merlin: Did you tour with him at one point?
John: I did.
John: I did a lot of touring with the Pernice brothers, Joe Pernice.
John: They would do a hell of a pop song.
Merlin: My God.
John: Boy, let me tell you, the Pernice brothers.
Merlin: They had a couple records there in, I guess, the early 2000s that were pretty great.
John: Bulletproof pop songs in the boy guitar singer vein.
Merlin: Yeah, and I can hardly remember any of them.
Merlin: It was a cut, the baby, and two.
Merlin: That was pretty late.
Merlin: Before that, they had that.
Merlin: All the working girls are high.
Merlin: Working girls.
Merlin: I'm not singing as good as him.
Merlin: The Working Girls, a little bit of a British accent.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
John: Very nice.
Merlin: I saw them live and they were good.
Merlin: They were a little bit proto, what was it, Jackie sexual?
Merlin: What do you call it?
Merlin: Lumber Jackie?
Merlin: Oh, a little lumber sexual, yeah.
John: I think that's one of the reasons that I always account for.
John: You know, Joe Pernice should have been a lot more famous, except that he looked like Bob Villa.
Merlin: Yeah, at some point he did an Elvis Costello on us.
Merlin: At first, I remember seeing pictures of him and he was a handsome slender man.
Merlin: And then all of a sudden he did an Elvis Costello and he had a peculiar beard and it gained some weight.
John: Yeah, and just sort of looked like he was here to put a new porch on the back of the house.
John: and then he gets up and he's singing these beautiful pop songs but his philosophy he had a whole philosophy of rock music which was that rock music that it was a working class uh he was a working class hero and he was making pop music for the people and he wasn't in it to get big and famous he was just doing it in the old style you know like he would do these tours where it was just like schenectady poughkeepsie
John: Six towns in Pennsylvania that maybe you heard of because the name was on the bottom of an oil can.
John: But like not a town you would ever think to go.
John: Like Allentown was the big town.
John: Next to this little constellation of towns where they made the little oil cans that you go quicker, quicker, quicker, quicker to put oil on your bike.
John: I totally understand.
John: Quaker state.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: So little towns like that.
John: And I would say to, you know, I'd be like, why are we playing?
John: Like, what about like Philadelphia?
John: It was like, well, sure, we could play Philadelphia.
John: But wouldn't you rather play Philadelphia?
John: Wouldn't you rather play six shows in little towns where the church is boarded up?
John: You know, when they start boarding up the church in a town, that's the end of the season.
John: You reach peak town.
John: You know?
John: Yeah.
John: But this peak princess business, Merlin, I'm serious about this.
Merlin: If I could, John.
Merlin: Excuse me.
Merlin: Rumpelstiltskin, in his rage, drove his right foot so far into the ground that it sank in up to his waist.
Merlin: That's angry.
Merlin: Then, in a passion, he sees the left foot with both hands and tore himself in two.
Merlin: That sounds like you.
Merlin: Now, wait a minute.
John: That sounds like you.
John: I've tried that exact move, and it can't be done.
John: Can you imagine putting in your foot up to the waist?
John: And then, like, you know what?
John: That makes me so mad.
John: I grab my other foot and just tear myself right in two.
Merlin: What a horrible way to end a story.
John: Yeah.
John: They just ran out of ideas.
Merlin: Is that a Grimm Brothers?
Merlin: It's got to be, right?
Merlin: Yeah, it's a Grimm Brothers.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: Yeah, Joe Pernice was good.
Merlin: I'm really sorry, John.
Merlin: I'm so full of MSG.
Merlin: I had about a pound of chow mein and fried fish for lunch.
John: My understanding was that you were an MSG denier.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: You know, I go back and forth.
Merlin: I go on the skeptics boards sometimes.
John: So describe your feelings right now.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And then tell me, do you attribute those feelings to MSG or do you not?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Right now, I think my feeling has to do with Grease and Wheat, which is one of the great Cat Stevens records.
Merlin: Was that Joni Mitchell?
Merlin: I can never remember.
John: Grease and Wheat.
John: That's what this whole country is founded upon.
Yeah.
John: The Quakers brought the wheat, and then the Pilgrims brought the grease.
John: Oh, and that's a schoolhouse rock.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: I had a lot of that and then some coffee.
Merlin: And so a conversation we've had before, I'm kind of on the bubble a little bit about the MSG thing.
Merlin: Are your teeth talking to you?
Merlin: My teeth chatter inside loose gums, and I can smell colors.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Some people say they feel MSG strongly, suddenly, and in a way that they can only describe as an MSG headache.
Merlin: I think it does things to your sinuses sometimes.
Merlin: People have an allergy kind of thing.
Merlin: I don't get that.
Merlin: I feel like I still have food in my mouth sometimes.
Merlin: There's still taste there after there's no food there.
Merlin: What do you use?
Merlin: Because I'm given to believe you have an MSG sixth sense.
John: Do you ever, when you were a younger guy and every once in a while you'd have to wear a tie, and maybe you'd wear a tie to a show or something and you'd sweat in your shirt, and then you get home at night and you try and take the tie off, but because the tie got wet, it kind of just, as you try and pull the tie off, it just sort of tightens on itself?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, it's like a prank where you're swimming and somebody ties your pants in a knot.
John: Yeah, you're swimming in pants and somebody ties them in and off.
John: Same thing.
John: Yeah.
John: And then you try and get the tie off and you kind of get it down a little bit, but it's like the tie then becomes a noose.
John: So then you try and pull it over your head and it gets like over your nose, but it can't go past your nose.
John: So it's like pulling your nose up.
John: And then you like get it, you know, and then the tie, the wet tie is basically tied around.
John: It's like binding your nose to the front of your face.
Merlin: Oh, that sounds like an enhanced interrogation kind of thing.
John: It almost is.
John: And then you're wandering around and you're like, am I going to have to cut this tie off?
John: That is the feeling of MSG for me.
John: There's a wet tie that's around the front of my face.
John: Wow.
John: And it's cutting off the blood to my scalp.
Merlin: So do you try to avoid it if you can?
Merlin: Well, what can you do?
Merlin: I live in the Pacific Rim.
Merlin: And people just flatly lie about it.
John: They do.
John: You walk in, and you're like, is there MSG in this food?
John: And the guy, he's using a yardstick to smooth the MSG off the top of one of those four-cup measuring cups.
John: And he's like, no MSG?
John: What are you talking about?
John: And then it just pours.
John: just pours that MSG into everything they're cooking because they don't believe that we, the MSG users do not believe that we MSG sufferers have real problems.
Merlin: So you're saying, if I understand it, most MSG users are, on the face of it, MSG deniers.
John: I would say.
John: I would say you can't be an MSG user and an MSG sufferer.
John: You have to be an MSG denier.
Merlin: Because it seems like, to get back to the fairy tales, a little bit of Princess and the P. Like, there's no way, since this doesn't actually do anything, there's no way anybody could ever tell that I just put four cups of this into the food.
John: Right, exactly.
John: But it's like trying to talk to somebody who has chronic fatigue syndrome or chronic pain.
John: Yeah.
John: And you're sitting there and you're talking to them and they're like, I suffer from this syndrome.
John: And it is impossible for you to get inside them and know what they're experiencing.
John: Irritable bowel syndrome.
Merlin: which i think you know a thing or two about uh i i thought i had that but i don't i have a different thing that's hard to diagnose but with ibs it's the worst crankiness i'm gonna split myself in two no with the ibs is the worst because you say oh my gosh i'm i feel really crummy uh i don't this is not what i have but people go oh you know you really you feel bad you go what's wrong
Merlin: Oh, my God, I have diarrhea.
Merlin: But yesterday I had constipation, and there's no way to prove that I have it.
Merlin: So you sound like a crazy person.
Merlin: It's one of those unknown etiology, unknown anything things.
John: Sure.
John: Come to the bathroom with me for a week, and you will feel a lot of sympathy for me.
John: But nobody wants to do that.
John: That's a Showtime series I don't want to watch.
John: I had a lot of fatigue a couple of years ago.
John: Not anything close to what I imagine chronic fatigue syndrome seems like.
John: But even a small amount of constant fatigue and depression is a tremendous burden.
John: Now imagine having something that you would even bother to characterize as chronic fatigue syndrome.
John: It sounds like a total nightmare.
John: And yet I think the biggest part of the nightmare for those people is that everywhere they go, people are like, what?
John: You're just lazy.
John: Have a Mountain Dew.
John: And you're like, no, I seriously like chronic fatigue syndrome.
John: Why would I make that up?
Merlin: I mean, you know, it's not it's not a very thing you'd want to announce like with pride, but it's also the thing is, I wonder how you do a differential diagnosis from from like a million other things, because that's probably about the last thing a doctor wants to come up with, because then that kind of means they're out of ideas.
Merlin: Yeah, that's like depression.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, it seems like there'd have to be so many things you'd have to rule out to get to that.
John: Yeah, well, it's like we've talked about before, the fact that there is no way to measure pain except with this, like, on a scale of one to five.
John: From a sad face to a happy face.
John: Fuck you.
John: Oh, I've started doing that with my daughter, though.
John: I'm like, because she'll be like, and I say, what is the matter?
John: And she's like, I want a candy cane.
John: I'm like, on a scale of one to five, how big of an issue is this for you emotionally?
Yeah.
John: and invariably she says oh one like right exactly so when you take a minute to really step away from it and reflect for a minute it's not that yeah how big of a deal is this and then the other day the other day she was uh she was doing her new routine which is like i like everybody except daddy and i was like on a scale of one to five how much do you not like daddy
John: And she thought about it.
John: She was like, three.
John: And that was the top score of anything she's ever, she's never gotten to a three on any scale.
Merlin: Are you sure she knows how to count?
John: And I was like, wow, okay.
John: A three.
John: You number three don't like daddy.
John: You're getting there.
John: I can handle that.
John: That's 60% not liking daddy.
Merlin: It's so nice, my daughter being able to write now.
Merlin: It's so nice to wake up in the morning, and she'll come in, and she'll leave an envelope.
Merlin: Like at night, she'll leave an envelope, so you can't open this until the morning.
Merlin: Until the morning.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's really sweet.
Merlin: For years, I would get little messages, like a little heart drawing or something.
Merlin: I opened one up the other day, and it said, in broken English, you are going to die.
Ha ha ha!
Merlin: Thanks, honey.
Merlin: Thanks, sweetie.
Merlin: Is that a three?
John: Climb inside your stone.
John: Yeah, feeling good about it.
John: I'm at my office, and I'm looking out at people, and it's kind of a cloudy, windy day, and I just feel very good right now.
John: I don't have chronic fatigue syndrome.
John: I have belly full of sushi syndrome.
Merlin: Oh, that's a nice afternoon.
John: It's much better.
Merlin: I was looking at... There's a site that my daughter and I refer to simply as our favorite website, which is just a Tumblr that's nothing but pictures of cute animals people scraped off of Reddit.
Merlin: So I looked at that, and I read most of a very long article about outrage on the Internet, on Slate.
John: It was really good.
John: Which one of those two articles is the one where you found the picture of the rat eating the cookie?
Yeah.
John: Hate crime, John.
Merlin: Yeah, Slate had a feature on 2014 in Outrage, and they went through each day of the year, and they have a whole giant calendar to show you what people were most outraged about in a given day.
John: Oh, I think I would actually find that pretty interesting.
Merlin: You'd find it very calming.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You know, one of my good friends on the Twitter made a thing called the Social Justice Kittens calendar.
John: Oh, yeah, that's Liartown.
John: That's Liartown, that's right.
John: Liartown's funny.
John: He's very funny.
John: He sent me a copy of the Social Justice Kittens calendar, so I've been looking at that every day and just taking a little bit of peace.
Merlin: I think people...
Merlin: I linked to that on the Tumblr and a lot of people got mad.
Merlin: And I think it's a shame that they didn't get why it's funny.
Merlin: Because it's funny for like five different reasons.
Merlin: If you can't find something to laugh at when looking at that calendar, there is an actual joke there.
Merlin: There is no one being harmed there.
Merlin: That is pictures of kittens saying exactly the kind of asinine things that people with internet access say about how beleaguered they are.
Merlin: Except it's a cat saying it, and it's really fucking funny.
John: It is funny.
John: It's funny, but you know, not being able to get the joke is kind of the character of the people that are being mocked in that calendar.
Merlin: This is my new theme song.
Merlin: my love is wandering in star flight you know there's words to that no yeah really i think it goes beyond the rim of the starlight something like that my love is wandering in star flight it's it's pretty bad now you are a pretty pretty pretty big star trek fan as a kid right
John: Well, if you had said which are you a bigger fan of Star Trek or the Twilight Zone, I would have absolutely said the Twilight Zone.
John: And this I'm talking about at a time when there were three channels on TV and then public television.
John: And late at night on one of the channels, you sometimes would see Star Trek reruns or Twilight Zone reruns or both.
Merlin: That's interesting.
Merlin: I feel like we very consistently got Star Trek solidly at 5 to 6 p.m.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: And when I discovered – right after Gilligan's Island – and when I discovered Twilight Zone, it was squarely at like 11 on the UHF.
John: 11 p.m.?
John: Yeah.
John: And for whatever reason, in Seattle –
John: We had Gilligan's Island, of course, and then we had Hogan's Heroes, and then we had the Munsters, and then we had Leave it to Beaver.
John: And that was what went in the afternoons between like 2 and 5.
John: Star Trek was, I think, for Western Washington audiences, considered more sophisticated, and it was later on at night.
Merlin: I remember 10.30 p.m.
Merlin: we had Crosswits.
Merlin: Remember, did you have Crosswits, the game show with crossword puzzles and funny celebrities?
John: No, are you kidding me?
John: People here were, at 10.30 p.m., they were busy sharpening their whittling tools.
John: There was no time for crossword puzzle-based game shows.
John: Twilight of the pan sharps.
John: Did you grow up in Leeds?
John: I mean, that doesn't even make any sense to me.
Merlin: No, around 10 o'clock, we started putting coal on our faces for the next day.
Merlin: So Gene Roddenberry, at one point, I forget the reason why, but he at some point was called upon to say what the lyrics to the song were.
Merlin: I will not sing them.
Merlin: I will read them.
Merlin: It's four lines.
Merlin: It's beyond the rim of the starlight.
Merlin: My love is wandering in starflight.
Merlin: I know he'll find in star-clustered reaches love, strange love, a star woman teaches.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: It kind of doesn't even match the song.
John: No, and it feels a little bit like Gene Roddenberry is coming out of that 50s and 60s science fiction author culture.
John: Oh, like hard science fiction.
John: Yeah, like Harlan Ellison land.
John: Unreasonable?
John: Well, and ultimately it's like they are picturing the cover of Heavy Metal Magazine over and over again.
Merlin: Sure, sure, sure, sure.
John: You know, where Conan is standing there with a sword and the girl in the ripped bikini.
John: So I think, I mean, there's a lot of that in Star Trek, and I think that song is like the poetry that maybe you would, if you were on a different planet, maybe it sounds better translated from its original language.
Merlin: Strange love a star woman teaches.
Merlin: So you're going to go out past the star clusters.
John: That's what I'm saying.
Merlin: And then you're going to meet a strange woman, a woman who's going to teach you strange love.
John: My love don't give me presents.
John: I think that that's a big part of that early science fiction is that a lot of teenage boys were not getting Earth love, and they were looking for strange love.
John: Terran love.
John: They were getting some of that, you know, they wanted some of the strange, if you know what I'm saying.
John: Except coming from, like, Mars women.
Merlin: Are you talking about that green lady who glides?
Merlin: The green glider.
Merlin: Wasn't there a green glidey lady?
Merlin: I know there's a green lady, but there's a lady like you didn't see her walk.
Merlin: She just kind of floated.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: See, I'm still super into that.
John: You and me both.
John: If I met a green lady that just glided.
John: Oh, forget it.
John: Or glid, as we say.
John: If she just glid from place to place.
Merlin: I'd follow her to her star clustered reaches.
John: Sold.
John: So I feel Star Trek.
John: There's a kid up the street.
John: And he was a little bit older than I was.
John: And his last name was Klingon.
John: Oh, that's rough.
John: Klingon.
John: But he was the oldest kid in the neighborhood.
John: So he was actually really cool.
John: Is that Polish?
Yeah.
John: I'm not clinging.
John: It might be.
Merlin: It sounds like an Americanization of something from Europe.
John: Maybe a German person, but who lived in Gdansk.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Or I'm sorry, not Gdansk.
John: Prague.
John: Not Prague, but like Polska.
John: The German town that now we call Gdansk.
John: It's the singer from that band, from the Misfits.
John: Danzig?
John: Danzig, right.
John: Danzig is what we call Gdansk now.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah, it used to be Danzig, and it was all German town, all Germans, but in what we think of now as Poland.
John: Whoa.
John: Big town, all Germans, and I think maybe they had names like Klingon up there.
Merlin: That's a tough name to grow up with.
John: Except, so he had one of those, oh, this was the, I'm having like a visceral reaction.
John: Are you time tripping?
John: I'm time tripping because he had one of those giant models of the Starship Enterprise in his room.
Oh, God.
John: Like one that you could take the top off and see inside the bridge and everything.
John: And his bedroom was kind of like, oh, so my neighborhood was all one-story houses, except the Klingons.
John: His name was Gary Klingon.
Merlin: That's horrible.
Merlin: It sounds like he's mispronouncing Klingon.
John: Yeah, it does.
John: And even at the time... It's pronounced Romulan.
John: Their house was the only house in the neighborhood.
John: And this is crazy to say.
John: There were 200 houses in my neighborhood.
John: His was the only one with a second story.
John: And his bedroom was on the second floor.
John: So that was already pretty amazing.
John: You could go up the stairs in this guy's house.
John: It was just like, wow, stairs in a house.
John: And then he had this Starship Enterprise in his room.
John: And I mean, I didn't go in his room a lot.
John: He was older than I was.
John: This was like a lucky treat when you could get to go in.
John: to his room and see this spaceship pretty hot stuff uh and then you know he grew up and got a car and drove away and i never saw him again but uh but star trek i mean i can't say that star trek was not very prominent on my on my landscape particularly in the years before star wars oh yeah right because we were nine nine ten years old when star wars came out right let's see i was 10 yeah
John: Yeah, so I would have been nine, I guess.
John: And, you know, from the age of four, I was pretty vested in Star Trek.
John: Even just not watching the show, but just like the toys and the...
Merlin: Man, they had the animated show on Saturday mornings.
John: Are you sighing because you're afraid of talking about Star Trek?
Merlin: No, no, no, I'm not.
Merlin: I'm thinking about it.
Merlin: I never got into it.
Merlin: And it's one of those things that...
Merlin: There are some things that I accidentally came across one or two times and instantly fell in love with.
Merlin: And Star Trek really seemed stiff to me when I was a kid.
Merlin: And some of my nerdier friends really liked it.
Merlin: Star Wars, everybody I knew liked Star Wars.
Merlin: And if they didn't like Star Wars, I didn't want to know them.
Merlin: That was huge for me.
Merlin: Star Wars took over my life for two years.
John: Did you have a friend that had the trash compactor playset?
No.
Merlin: I owned it.
Merlin: I got it for Christmas.
Merlin: You're kidding.
Merlin: It was pretty crappy.
Merlin: Well, yeah, it was crappy to own.
Merlin: In the pantheon of Star Wars toys, it is not high up.
John: It might have been crappy to own, but it was the only Star Wars toy that I knew anybody to have.
John: It was the only one I ever had access to.
John: And I had very limited and restricted access to it because it was over at my friend's house and I could only play with it occasionally.
John: And boy, did I think it was pretty impressive.
John: It had that little garbage compactor with the Nerf in it.
John: Yeah, with the foam.
John: Yeah.
John: And the little monster.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, that was a scene that really made an impression.
Merlin: Oh, of course.
Merlin: Well, I think if I could pick one to still have today, the really cherry one even then was Han's blaster.
Merlin: The life-size blaster that had batteries in it?
Merlin: It was kind of heavy and felt really solid.
Merlin: That was awesome.
Merlin: I had an X-Wing fighter.
Merlin: You push the R2-D2 and it makes a noise.
John: Yeah, I think I might have... No, wait.
Merlin: I think if you press the R2-D2, the wings go out.
Merlin: It doesn't seem very plausible.
Merlin: But that was a great toy.
Merlin: It's just the trash compactor didn't have great build quality.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: But I had all the figures.
Merlin: I had them all.
John: You know what you did?
John: I'm sorry that you don't now.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I still have them.
Merlin: I gave them to my daughter mostly.
John: Oh, that's right.
John: And she chewed off the lightsabers.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: They came off in 1978.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: i told you that story right yeah yeah you did you did i mailed off to the the counter people and one day in the mail four star wars characters arrived incredible greatest day of my life almost as great as the day that i got those kiss albums for free incredible uh my number one stories john got a lot of stories my number one play set was the guns of navarone play set did you inherit that from somebody
John: No, the Guns of Navarone playset was a mid-70s playset, not based on the... I think it was based on the original Guns of Navarone film, but what caused it to be put into production was the Force 10 from Navarone.
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Is Guns of Navarone based on something else?
Merlin: Is it based on...
Merlin: What am I thinking of?
Merlin: I'm thinking of a thing that's based on Seven Samurai.
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Why do I think this is based on something else?
John: Guns of Navarone was like a strange retelling of the battle for Crete.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Yes, yes, yes.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: Of course, of course.
John: David Niven was in it.
John: You love David Niven.
John: I do love David Niven.
John: Is that where he was the bomb guy?
John: He's the British bomb guy.
John: Corporal Miller.
John: That's right.
John: He never got promoted, but he was very aristocratic.
John: But, you know, he's an aristocratic guy playing like just a man of the people, but very... And Anthony Quinn is in there.
Merlin: Gregory Peck, it looks like.
John: Gregory Peck.
John: What a cast.
John: An amazing film.
John: And...
John: And then, so then Force 10 from Navarone.
John: Oh, that's the one with Robert Shaw.
John: And Harrison Ford.
John: And Barbara Bach.
John: Look at that.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: And so that movie came out.
John: It had nothing to do with the tower, with the mountain.
John: Guns of Navarone is about a mountain.
John: Force 10 from Navarone is about a dam.
John: And somehow, Force 10 from Navarone came out in the 70s, but Hasbro or whatever, some toy company, made the guns of Navarone play set.
John: Because presumably every... Maybe that's what they had rights to.
John: Every eight-year-old kid in America at the time had watched that movie that was then 20 years old in black and white with their dad at night on the late movie.
John: You're not going anywhere.
John: Get back in here.
John: That's right.
John: Come on.
John: Come on.
John: You got to watch this late movie.
John: I mean, I saw The Longest Day 42 times because my dad never, never turned off the late movie.
John: And it was always a World War II movie.
John: And I mean, that's how I learned about the world.
John: It's just like, here we go.
John: Force 10 from Navarone.
John: So this was a giant play set.
John: It had two cannons.
John: It had an elevator.
John: It had multiple tiers.
John: And you could sit and play.
John: You could assault this fortress, this mountain fortress.
John: I mean, I'm not saying you could, but one could assault this mountain fortress with your little green army men every day for a thousand years and never get bored.
John: If I still had it, I think I would still play with it.
John: Guns of Navarone.
John: Guns of Navarone playset.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Some of my favorite toys were ones that I had.
Merlin: The reason I asked you if it was inherited was some of my favorite toys that actually held up and were fun for a long time were toys that I got from other kids from the 60s.
Merlin: you know like uh like the tarzan or like i got a whole shoebox full of original batman cards from 1966 um like a remote control car that was like 10 years old and still worked i can't even imagine that with the shit my daughter gets today i can't even imagine that stuff would even would still work after 10 years
John: The toy that I remember inheriting from an older cousin was the James Bond DB5 Aston Martin.
John: Oh, the little Corgi?
John: The Corgi die-cast one.
John: Oh, those were amazing.
John: My friends collected those.
John: They were so cool.
John: And they had all the like the license plate flipped.
John: The passenger seat was an ejector seat.
John: There was a little super detailed a metal shield that sprung up that was bulletproof in the back window.
John: The headlights were guns like all these things and they all worked.
John: And my cousins bought that toy in 1964 and used it, and then I inherited it in 74, and it all still worked.
John: I wish I still had that.
John: I feel like I'm going to spend all night on eBay tonight looking at die-cast Corgi cars from the 60s.
Merlin: Before you do that, you're going to want to go to YouTube and watch a really poorly shot video in some guy's basement showing off his famous World War II Battle of Navarone giant playset.
Merlin: Because it looks...
Merlin: Does it have a beachhead?
Merlin: And amphibious vehicles?
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: And a big mountain with ladders on it?
Merlin: What am I Googling?
Merlin: Oh, my Christ.
Merlin: I'll send it to you in the dingus.
Merlin: Yeah, it's got ladders, and it's got everything.
Merlin: It's like army men to the 10th power.
Merlin: It's army men, but they're cool-looking army men.
Merlin: They've got amphibious vehicles and a raft and a flag.
John: It looks amazing.
John: So there are the gray army men who are the Nazis, and then the green army men are the Americans.
John: The Yanks.
John: And the British, to a lesser extent, let's be honest, to a lesser extent.
Merlin: The Allies.
John: The Allies, that's right.
John: The Americans and then the Allies, who are a motley group of explosives experts.
John: Would you say ragtag?
John: A ragtag group of Greeks and, you know, kung fu people.
John: You know, people that you need to win a war.
John: The Greeks, the Kung Fu people.
John: The Kung Fu people, the Greeks, the Brits.
John: You got to have those people on your side to win a war, but it's the Americans front and center.
John: Yep.
John: Right in the middle.
John: Gregory goddamn Peck.
John: Yes.
John: Yeah.
John: Making the call, ultimately.
John: Making the call.
John: Somebody's got to make the call, and it's got to be... Sure.
John: You don't want to yank there.
John: You're going to want to yank for that.
Merlin: This guy also has something in his basement.
Merlin: It's a thought technology that I still find kind of fascinating.
Merlin: It's what I can clearly identify as something I believe is called a video game chair.
John: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Do you wear an Aeron chair?
Merlin: Nope, nope, nope.
Merlin: Are you aware of video game chairs?
Merlin: Apparently I'm not.
Merlin: It's a chair you buy to play video games in.
Merlin: Does it have a cup holder?
Merlin: No, this one has a pillow on it for extra comfort, it looks like.
Merlin: A pillow on the bottom?
Merlin: Yeah, you should go with a video game chair.
Merlin: You can get a chair to play video games in.
Merlin: It's kind of like a shitty little footless rocking chair.
Merlin: And you can sit there on the floor.
Merlin: That way you can sit on the floor without sitting on the floor.
Merlin: Okay, okay, okay.
Merlin: It's like a sex bean bag.
Merlin: Kind of, except for video games and you're alone.
Merlin: See, I can't watch the YouTube video.
Merlin: There's a reason they don't sell it in pairs.
John: I can't watch that YouTube video because my operating system is so old that it's blocked plug-ins.
John: Oh, bleep blue.
John: But, oh, I'm looking at the video game chair, and let me tell you, I feel like how many...
John: fraternity guys do you think die every year going downstairs in a video game chair oh because if i had that the first thing i would do back when i was drinking when i was a young person i would take that to the top of the biggest flight of stairs it seems like such a natural fit john i gotta tell you i have not i just sent you another link i think you should be able to see this one i i had never actually spent that much time looking into video game chairs of mine
Merlin: But first of all, the first thing he goes, wow, those are really high tech.
Merlin: And the second thing is they look a lot like children's seats you put in a car.
Merlin: Yes, they do.
Merlin: They look exactly like that.
Merlin: Except there's a guy holding a controller in his hand.
John: Yeah, look at him go.
John: And he's got glasses on, he's got short hair.
John: Some of these actually look a little bit like Captain Kirk's chair.
John: Why did somebody not design a video game chair that is an exact replica of Captain Kirk's chair?
John: You know what?
John: That sounds like something that is probably out there.
John: I think that if you bought that, if you put that for sale, it would be a big hit.
John: Because people apparently are buying enough of these things that there are literally...
Merlin: John, this is a little bit almost like a love doll.
Merlin: It would take so much self-knowledge to spend a lot of money on one of these.
Merlin: You'd really have to be okay with who you are to have something like this.
Merlin: If you scroll down a little bit, there's some that are almost like a dentist chair with a big Soloflex arm overhead to have your screens on.
John: I mean, I don't want to say that these are built just for jacking it.
John: No.
John: Oh my gosh, they might as well call them masturbation chairs.
John: They don't look comfortable in the lower back area.
John: They're curved in a very slothy sort of supine... That's not how you would...
Merlin: Well, I don't know if your car seat was anything like ours.
Merlin: I mean, I always felt I have a terrible relationship with car seats.
Merlin: I hate them.
Merlin: I hate putting them in.
Merlin: I hate taking them out.
Merlin: I hate trying to make them secure.
Merlin: And I somehow end up cutting my hand when I have to do anything serious, like in a rental car, do some really invasive stuff with it.
John: I've got a bad scar on my hand from the freaking car seats.
Merlin: I got – I literally – there was blood on our stairs from this deep cut I got from a kid's car seat, like a Graco car seat.
Merlin: But the thing – the really distinguished quality, and I don't mean to be the Apple guy here.
Merlin: The most amazing thing about my kid's car seat is there was no way – it was almost like something they – an experiment at MIT.
Merlin: There was no way to put my kid's car seat down that it didn't fall over.
Merlin: You put it down no matter what.
John: And that's what this looks like.
Merlin: It would not stand up on its own, you're saying.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: And that's the same thing with these.
Merlin: Some of them, it looks like there's a place to put a... You can have remote control.
Merlin: You certainly have a drink holder.
John: My goodness.
John: Would you have one of... I mean, this is the thing.
John: Do you remember a little TV show called Friends?
John: I do.
John: And do you remember Joey and Chandler had the two chairs?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Joey and Chandler had old, beat-up chairs that they loved, and it was their chairs.
Merlin: Oh, I'm not sure.
John: Is that right?
John: I think you're remembering all in the family.
John: I don't know if I've ever seen a whole episode of Friends.
John: So my understanding is that Joey and Chandler at a certain point somewhere in the series, which ran for many decades.
John: Oh, was it like massage chairs?
John: Was that it?
John: Something like they got Joey, I think, probably did it.
John: Maybe Chandler.
John: Chandler was nicer.
Yeah.
John: uh chandler was the could you be more something yeah he would be but he would do nice joey and chandler and they got lazy boys it looks like they got some late i think it's lazy boys they got that were like their tv watching chairs yeah and it was a big moment in the show when these two guys it was part of their male friendship
John: And they just said, like, we got these chairs and we're watching TV.
John: And I think all across America there was a collective sigh of relief from men between the ages of probably 15 and 50.
John: Because these guys had validated the idea that getting a chair for the sole purpose of sitting and watching TV was, like, not just a valid life choice, but, like...
John: It was a progressive and fun choice.
John: You had really arrived.
John: We got these chairs.
John: We have arrived.
John: What else do you need?
John: We've got a TV and we've got these chairs for watching TV.
John: And the extension of that now, of that thinking now to this world of a thousand lampreys, as our good friend Grant made sure I knew.
John: Not Remora.
John: Oh, I feel bad.
John: Lampreys.
John: I did say eels.
John: Yeah.
John: But these lampreys, and I think the video game chair is, you know, it's just a form of like...
John: Maybe what it is is it's a way of saying, Mom, I'm never leaving.
John: This is my flag.
John: I'm planting this flag.
John: Or, conversely, I just made $400 million in my initial public offering, and I own an 11,000 square foot house.
John: So I spent $60 on a masturbation seat.
John: I own an 11,000 square foot house in Palo Alto, and the only furnishing is two jack-off chairs.
John: And my eight-person... PlayStation 12 or whatever.
John: My eight-person jacuzzi tub is empty and full of dirty laundry.
Merlin: That would be so sad.
John: And there's one Lamborghini poster on my bedroom wall to give me something to look at as I go to sleep at night.
John: You paint quite a picture.
John: Well, you know, I've been around.
John: I've traveled.
John: I've seen a little bit of the world.
Merlin: Just because you're not on a lot of boards of directors right now doesn't mean you haven't been asked, I'm sure.
John: Well, I haven't been asked enough.
John: I mean, I really do feel at some point, Merlin, that there's going to be someone, some listener of our program, who has tremendous good fortune, professional good fortune, or political good fortune, and when he or she, when they really...
John: search their feelings, they're going to say, everything that I know, I learned from John and Merlin.
John: And when that happens, they're going to send a white Hummer limo to your house and to mine, and we're going to open the door, stand in there in our bathrobes.
John: And outpours the bitcoins.
John: You're probably going to be holding like a half-eaten hot dog.
John: I'm going to be holding a sword.
John: Maybe I won't even be wearing a bathrobe.
John: And there's going to be a driver, and he's going to say, Mr. Mann, or conversely, Mr. Roderick.
John: We're going to go, yes.
John: And then, yeah, that's right.
John: He's going to be like, here is a giant Filson bag full of Bitcoins.
John: And an engraved invitation to be on the board of directors of the most famous company in the world.
Merlin: Something you brought up numerous times that at first I wasn't so sure about and now I'm very interested in is I like that you're very forthcoming about saying to people, yeah, that's all well and good.
Merlin: We could do stuff in the future.
Merlin: I want to know how to make money off of something that you've already made money off of.
Merlin: I like the idea.
Merlin: You seem to be socializing an idea that you might be excellent as like a retroactive co-founder.
Merlin: Like retconned.
Merlin: Retroactive continuity.
Merlin: We're going to change some of the original papers.
Merlin: John will, in retrospect, have been a co-founder.
John: Right.
John: Because I feel like what ends up happening is that people found a thing based on... Fuck it up.
John: They found a thing based on their arrogance in the moment.
John: And then they'd run it into the ground.
John: At a certain point, they have a reckoning.
John: They have a come-to-Jesus moment.
John: They're walking out in the forest.
John: Snow is coming down.
John: They're like, what is wrong with me, God?
John: And then they think, how did I get here?
John: Oh, shit.
John: And then a ghost of you floats down.
John: That's right.
John: And then I'm like, I appear in the snow.
John: Yep.
John: And I'm basically Lemmy Winks.
John: No, I'm not Lemmy Winks.
John: I'm the frog prince.
John: And I go, let me winks, let me winks.
John: I don't know what that is.
John: I sing a little song, and I tell you about the journey you're about to go on.
John: And then you realize, shit, he is a co-founder.
John: I never realized it.
John: His thought technology's got me here, and yet turning my back on him, I have now been deposited into this hell, into this snowy hellscape.
John: And I need to go walk back down the path,
John: And again, as you say, retroactively...
John: acknowledge, I guess, the contribution, and then start receiving direct input.
John: Tap into the direct input of the now.
Merlin: It would not be that complicated to give you undiluted shares that basically make you the equivalent of a co-founder money-wise.
Merlin: I think you're asking for something more.
Merlin: It sounds like you're asking that they go in and actually literally change the founding records to make you have been that person for years before, and I think maybe give you an apology.
Merlin: As a fixer,
John: Sort of as that character from Pulp Fiction.
John: Oh, the wolf.
John: The wolf.
John: Who comes in, never actually touches anything, stands there in a tuxedo with his Acura NXS.
John: Pointing?
John: NSX.
Merlin: You get to drive fast, show up, order people around, and point.
John: Yeah, and just say, like, you.
John: Clean up the brains.
John: You.
John: Throw your clothes in a bag.
John: And then...
John: John Cusack's brother or sister.
John: That was Joan Cusack in that movie, wasn't it?
Merlin: Oh, see, now you're going to make me look this up.
John: Yeah, Joan Cusack is going to... It's Julia Sweeney.
John: Oh, Julia Sweeney is going to take this car full of dead bodies.
John: That's weird.
John: Julia Sweeney was in Pulp Fiction.
John: That's so weird.
John: She's going to take this car full of dead bodies, and she's going to take it to her father's junkyard, and it's going to disappear.
John: And for this problem-solving, I get paid an astronomical summary.
Merlin: It seems like a lot to John Travolta, but you needed the wolf.
Merlin: You needed somebody calm there.
Merlin: You need somebody who knows what's what can keep their head in a situation like that.
John: And I feel like that's me in corporate America.
John: And I don't think the old guard, the old guard isn't ever going to relinquish that.
John: authority to somebody like me who comes from an outsider perspective.
John: I feel like the young people, particularly the young people that listen to our program, the young people who wear spread-collar shirts and who have potentially video game chairs...
John: They're going to say at a certain point, I am over my head here.
John: I'm surrounded by former Google vice presidents who have degrees in finance who are telling me what I should do, but I don't trust any of them.
Merlin: All that yammering.
Merlin: Here's the thing, John.
Merlin: Here's the problem.
Merlin: Okay, so here's my pitch for you.
Merlin: You are an early stage undisruptor.
Merlin: So here's what I mean by that.
Merlin: First of all, what has every company got?
Merlin: They got way too many people fucking disrupting too many things.
Merlin: They're just making a big mess, right?
Merlin: And they don't figure out until it's too late.
Merlin: I think you come in there, or why do I say early stage?
Merlin: Maybe you're an angel round undisruptor.
Merlin: You come in, you say, sit the fuck down.
Merlin: Let's everybody just calm down.
Merlin: Let's stop disrupting things.
John: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Wipe that smirk off your face.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Get up out of that video game chair and go sit down like a gentleman at the table.
John: That's right.
John: And whatever you're drinking, throw it in the garbage.
John: We're drinking coffee here.
John: We're drinking straight coffee out of coffee cups, not paper cups, coffee cups.
John: And if one person says core competency while I'm in the room, I'm going to kick you in the balls.
John: I picture you coming in with a scroll.
John: Now, let's get down to brass tacks.
John: And the thing is, I'm not saying that there are going to be 50 people who listen to this program who find themselves in this situation.
John: We don't need 50, John.
John: We need like three.
John: Three people over the course of the next 25 years who wake up one day and say, holy shit, I'm over my head.
Merlin: Genuinely ready to be undisrupted.
John: That's right.
John: I have more resources than I know what to do with.
John: I am surrounded by sharks and by people I do not like or trust.
John: I'm surrounded by 22-year-old men I can't trust.
John: And 50-year-old men I can't trust.
John: That's a good point.
John: When you open up a catalog now, there's always one gray-bearded guy in there who's wearing skinny jeans and two shirts over a sweater and all this weird shit.
John: He's serious but relaxed.
John: serious but relaxed and he is there to he's there as the kind of like oh that's the guy he runs my company or whatever the young ceo he's only 55 you're surrounded by those guys and you say this none of these people have what i need i need a scimitar i need i need somebody who's going to come in here and tell us what we can drink first off first off
John: Before we go another step, because all these guys that went to Thunderbird Business College, they roll in there and they see a meeting table strewn with Starbucks cups and they don't say shit about it because they're not thinking at the micro level.
John: This board of directors is not going to be able to make a single worthwhile decision if we are all sitting here drinking Starbucks out of paper cups.
John: That's not how business gets done.
John: I'm here to tell you.
John: I'm afraid.
John: You start with some of the little things.
John: That's right.
John: I'm afraid to tell you.
John: And you, sit up in your chair, God damn it, and put your shoes back on.
John: Pull up your pants.
John: You know?
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: Put your shoes back on.
Merlin: I'm the old Bill Cosby before it came out.
Merlin: That you have to come in and tell people to put their shoes back on.
John: Put your shoes on.
John: You're in an office.
John: The first thing we're going to do in this office is build some goddamn walls between people's desks.
John: And the ping pong table goes.
John: I'm sorry.
John: I'm sorry.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: You're going to change.
Merlin: Somebody's got to be the bad guy.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I think that's your core competency.
Merlin: Oof.
Merlin: Right in the balls.