Ep. 143: "Traffic Cones & Retirees"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: I'm going hungry.
John: Yeah.
John: I passed a truck on the way in here that had a Soundgarden Louder Than Love bumper sticker, and it was a new bumper sticker on an old truck, and it really put me into a spin.
John: What did that get you thinking about?
John: Well, where you get a new Soundgarden Louder Than Love bumper sticker.
John: I bet you can get that at that store at the airport.
John: Oh, yeah, well, maybe, yeah.
Merlin: Were they on Sub Pop?
John: They were on Sub Pop in the early days.
John: Yeah, maybe that's where they got it, at the airport.
Merlin: When you said you passed the truck, I was a little worried for you for a minute.
John: Yeah, I know, right?
John: The way I've been eating.
John: Chili trucks.
John: Now you sound sick.
John: Oh my God, Sean.
John: Did you have a bad... Hang on, hang on.
Merlin: Did you get bird flu?
Merlin: I'm going to try so hard to ride the cough button.
Merlin: Do you have a cough button?
Merlin: I have a keyboard-based hacky cough button.
Merlin: I'm told that I could get a hardware cough button, but I don't know if I'm going to be sticking with the podcasting stuff all that long, so I don't want to go crazy.
John: I know, I know.
John: Don't make any kind of big investment.
John: How do you do this keyboard hack?
John: Well, there are a variety of these.
Merlin: Are you really interested in this?
Merlin: Are you kidding?
Merlin: This is what our podcast is all about.
Merlin: We have not talked on our podcast in so long.
Merlin: It's been so long.
Merlin: We've done a lot.
Merlin: We have a lot to talk about.
Merlin: But let's start with mute buttons.
Merlin: I have something called mute my mic.
John: Oh, wait.
Merlin: Is this an app?
Merlin: It's an app.
Merlin: And then you hit a button, and it mutes it.
John: Whoa, it's an app.
Merlin: It's an app.
Merlin: Oh, it's got in-app mic purchases and mute.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Can you level up?
John: Can you get it so it doesn't have ads?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Well, it's ad-supported, and then occasionally it pops up pink noise, unless you pay.
Merlin: It's just one more fucking eel.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, you know, my computer is an IBM 8086.
John: Okay.
John: Let me double check.
Merlin: Let me check the availability of that.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: This is going to be tricky.
John: I'm running machine language.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Is it beige, John?
Merlin: It is beige.
Merlin: Hang on a second.
Merlin: It is beige.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: B...
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Yeah, there's a shareware version.
John: Oh, good.
Merlin: Does it run on Linus?
Merlin: Yeah, you need to get the new Linus World CD-ROM.
Merlin: You can get that over at your Barnes & Noble.
Merlin: And you're going to do a batch slash dot exe dot no space spelled out.
John: somebody asked me to burn them a cd the other day our friend adam pranica said can you just burn me a cd and i was like what can i and then i was like i could uh but where do you get a cd anymore and then he then he was like oh wait i have a usb drive on my keychain
Merlin: yeah i was like you know what isn't that crazy fuck yeah i know i know yeah you know it's funny this i'm using a really i have a pretty old well by any standard except perhaps yours i have a very very old desktop computers from 2006 and um and uh can that be true are you really running a 2006 piece of hardware i hate buying computers
John: But how does it... I mean, Apple, by design, makes their upgrades kill old computers.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: It's running some very old, hacked-up software that I'm not proud of.
Merlin: Oh, but you've hacked it up.
Merlin: It's got a hack.
Merlin: But you know what's funny is when I bought this, even as recently, that's like a year before my daughter was born, I bought this computer.
Merlin: In that age, I had the presence of mind to buy...
Merlin: I bought a Mac Pro with two DVD read-only drives.
Merlin: Excuse me, excuse me.
Merlin: Two CD... CD DVDs.
Merlin: Yeah, it reads DVDs too, but it doesn't write.
Merlin: I have two optical drives for reading discs.
Merlin: Because I don't know what I was... I guess at some point I was thinking, I might want to watch two movies at once.
LAUGHTER
Merlin: It's so bizarre.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It already feels like a million years away.
Merlin: I've got a Blu-ray burner and ripper thing that's kind of janky, but that works.
Merlin: But I can't believe how rarely – it's almost like a fax machine now – how rarely I have to make DVD or CD dubs.
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Why would you?
Merlin: It's funny because it used to be such – I can remember when you could first make CDs on a Mac, it seemed amazing because CD was the coin of the realm.
Merlin: If you could make something that played like a CD that you dropped into a CD player, it was like the most amazing thing in the world.
John: I remember that too.
Merlin: Well, absolutely.
Merlin: And of course, you know, you've given me stuff in the past on CDs that is unreleased and things like that.
Merlin: But it's funny how now that feels like such an unnecessary middle step because what are you going to do as soon as you get the CD?
Merlin: Put it in your iPhone.
Merlin: Yeah, you're going to rip it and try to get it back.
Merlin: It just seems so bizarre.
Merlin: It's like, you know, like I say, it's like anybody who wants you to fax them forms.
Merlin: It feels so bizarre to me.
John: You're talking about my entire life now because every week somebody wants me to fax them a fucking form.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: I remember the first Mac I saw, the ones that looked like cough drops.
John: Oh, the iMac.
John: The iMac.
John: When those first came out, the first one I saw did not...
John: have a cd player oh no it did it had a cd didn't have a floppy drive it had a cd reader but it couldn't write to it and it didn't have a uh one of those little mini disc floppy drives and i was like well how do you write stuff to it how do you how do you how do you like and they the owner of this particular machine said well they don't there isn't a method to do that
Merlin: I bet they very patiently rolled their eyes to explain to poor John what it's like to be alive in the 20th century.
John: And I was astonished that you would spend that much money to buy a thing that you couldn't export from.
Merlin: You Were Not Alone.
Merlin: That was a very controversial choice.
Merlin: And over the years, there's been a number of things that Apple has done now that we're doing a technology podcast.
Merlin: There's a number of things Apple has done that have been very controversial because for most of us growing up, that was one of the primary – it would be like getting a car without a steering wheel almost.
Merlin: Or a car without a –
Merlin: Without a what?
Merlin: Windshield?
Merlin: I mean – Trunk?
Merlin: Cup holder?
Merlin: But just the ability – I mean the whole point was we always did everything with disks and that seemed crazy.
Merlin: And now today it's getting even crazier because with the laptops they make, one of the constraining factors to how thin the laptop can be is consistently those ports on the sides.
John: Oh, ports, right.
Merlin: And you don't want ports because everything's in the cloud.
Merlin: It's in the cloud.
Merlin: But when they started the first time, now you do not get an optical drive on a laptop.
Merlin: Also, it's a huge source of power consumption.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: And then, for example, like an Ethernet cable.
Merlin: Like now they're too thin to have an Ethernet port.
John: Right.
Merlin: So you have to have USB.
Merlin: But even USB is kind of, you know, is pretty thick.
John: Right.
John: Oh, so thick.
John: I mean, I'm too thin for an Ethernet cable.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: Look at you.
John: You look fantastic.
John: We should get Gruber in Syracuse to come on this podcast and we could talk about Apple.
Merlin: Don't give it away.
Right.
John: we got plans i'm not saying anything yeah we should because you know boy there's just not enough what about the apple watch john are you excited about the apple watch you know i really am i saw a guy the other day uh where where was i oh i was at the grocery store and the guy that was checking me out was wearing a giant gold crown on a chain
John: Like a regal crown?
John: Well, it wasn't like a three-dimensional crown.
John: It was a two-dimensional crown.
John: And there was a part of me that wanted to ask if it was about Ethiopia, and a part of me that wanted to ask if it was about reggae, and then the majority part of me that just realized that I was not meant to ask what the crown was about.
Really?
Merlin: I think if you wear a crown on a chain, you're really asking people, you're kind of throwing it out there that you want people to talk about it.
John: The guy at the grocery store was sending a very palpable, do not engage me in conversation vibe.
John: Yeah.
John: So I was like, this is, you know, it's unusual in the 21st century to have a customer service experience where the person on the other end is sending out a very capable but not engageable vibe.
John: All too rare, if you ask me.
John: And so I was like, I respect your capability, and we're just going to share this time together as two men who are not making chit-chat, even though you are wearing a giant gold crown on a giant gold chain.
John: But then, on closer inspection, so I'm looking at the crown and I'm like, oh boy, I really want to talk about this crown, but he really doesn't want me to talk.
John: He might want to talk about it, but he doesn't want to talk about it with me.
John: And so then I'm looking, I'm scanning him like, well, let's see, is there any other way that I can engage this person in conversation?
John: And then he's wearing some giant technology watch.
John: And I was like, oh, fuck.
John: Now I really want to talk to him about the watch.
John: And maybe that's the inroad into then after we're chatting about the watch, then be like, so the crown.
Mm-hmm.
John: But at that point, I kind of looked up, hopefully, at him like, I've got something that isn't the crown to talk about.
John: It's the watch.
John: And he continued to be very capable.
John: And very uninterested in engaging.
John: And so I was like, all right, I'm going to let the watch and the crown just be his private business.
John: I'm going to be over here in my private business.
John: I should be thinking about something else anyway.
John: What am I trying to talk to this guy for?
John: I should be thinking about deep thoughts.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I just left the whole thing in my past.
John: I wouldn't have even thought about it again if he hadn't brought up the Apple watch.
Yeah.
John: And this guy's watch, I don't think it was an Apple watch.
Merlin: It might have been what's called a Pebble watch.
Merlin: Pebble is a company that makes an ungainly large, silly watch.
John: I have noticed about Nokia that whenever Apple announces something, Nokia comes out with the slightly bigger...
John: Maybe more capable and yet still less desirable version of it right away.
John: That's a core competency.
Merlin: Samsung's pretty good at that, too.
John: Samsung, right.
John: So it could have been one of those, but it was like, you know, it was a watch where by its blankness...
John: By the empty screen, it suggested an infinite capability.
John: Here's the watch.
John: It's infinitely capable.
John: Perhaps he could videoconference with his handler.
John: He could...
Merlin: He could get real-time feedback on how well he's doing at his grocery tasks?
John: Yeah.
John: That's right.
John: I could use the app Bump.
Merlin: You could send him flus or possibly beans?
John: I could.
John: Let's see.
John: I bet he could hack into a mainframe if his team encountered a firewall at some point.
Yeah.
John: he could like rewrite the encryption right oh you got to rewrite the encryption he'd rewrite the encryption and hack into the mainframe right there from his watch i just i felt like wow it's infinite possibilities and i'm sure if he touched it and showed me what it did it like he could scroll through his his eye photo uh and he it can either be a clock or it can be a message where he told someone he's at work
Merlin: where are you i am at work you get those get those bumps where it's like today at two o'clock you are scheduled to do a podcast oh my god you remind me of something um is it um listen we're gonna put this out today because we need to put out a show so can we talk a little bit about what's what's been happening what we've been doing current times yeah let's talk about exciting we're on we're on a cruise we have we talked we haven't really talked about that have we haven't talked about the cruise
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I want to get to that, but one thing was, as you know, in flying out of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, first of all, I learned, very small airport.
Merlin: Not a lot of stuff to do there.
John: Small airport, there are live birds in it.
John: Not tame birds, but wild birds.
John: Also, Tom Arnold was there, and he seemed nice.
John: Did you meet Tom Arnold at the Fort Lauderdale Airport?
Merlin: My lady saw him at the place where you buy water and candy, and he said he was being very nice with people.
Merlin: It's nice to hear.
John: Isn't that nice?
Merlin: Isn't that nice?
Merlin: Well, so we, long story short, you know, everybody that was on this cruise that arrived that day, at the end of the cruise, was going to be flying out of FLL, which is, as I think I mentioned, a very small airport.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: A lot of things could have been planned better on our part.
Merlin: There was some miscommunications.
Merlin: Long story short, we ended up getting there at, I think, about 10 in the morning.
Merlin: Yeah, you kind of raced off the boat and got immediately to the airport.
Merlin: Yeah, and then we flew out at 8 o'clock that night.
Merlin: So we had a nice long day to really take in the airport.
Merlin: And it was, you know...
Merlin: It was kind of a trial.
Merlin: Did you go to the Chili's 2?
Merlin: I went to the Chili's 2 twice.
Merlin: I treated my family to Chili's 2 twice.
Merlin: Each plate was more disappointing than the last.
John: I've eaten at that Chili's 2 and I remember I ordered something and it came with like a single kernel of corn on top.
Merlin: You got the Jimmy Crack corn platter.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: I don't care.
John: I think it was the salsa, maybe?
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Yeah, well, it's, you know, they've got about 850 drinks in a microwave oven, and that's the Chili's, too.
Merlin: No place else is Chili's, literally.
Merlin: Well, anyway, the funny part was we're stuck there, and, you know, we're trying to, you know, our kid was being, considering everything, was being very patient, considering.
Merlin: But, you know, you sit there, and we found a little kind of, like, quiet area where there weren't too many people around, but one of the things...
Merlin: I don't know why I'm mentioning this is, you know, people love to talk on their phone at the airport.
Merlin: And I, I just, it's only in airports that I really realize I feel like how much most other people talk on their phone or,
Merlin: More than I do.
Merlin: And by which I mean, they make a lot more calls than I do, but they talk on the phone for a very, very, very long time, often very loudly, much longer than I do.
Merlin: And it's amazing because I'll do anything I can to try and, you know, I'll do phone calls with people.
Merlin: I'll talk to you.
Merlin: I'll talk to clients.
Merlin: Get off the phone, though.
Merlin: The goal of getting on the phone is to get off the phone.
Merlin: Oh, 100%.
Merlin: I mean, I totally agree.
Merlin: But there was this one conversation that was so – it was so boring.
Merlin: And so long – here's the conversation.
Merlin: It's a woman there who's going to fly out.
Merlin: So, of course, like everybody in an airport, she has to explain everything about what she's doing and what she's going to be doing.
Merlin: She's explaining that she's sitting at the airport calling you.
Merlin: She wants to let you know what she's doing.
Merlin: She's at the airport.
Merlin: I'm calling you.
Merlin: She's going to fly out later, but for right now, she just wanted to call and check in.
Merlin: And it became apparent in the fullness of time that this woman was talking to her young daughter, a daughter of maybe high school age, but around late high school age.
Merlin: And the entire conversation, you could tell that no matter what the girl said, the mother had some really...
Merlin: annoying karma suck response to everything that her daughter said.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: So first of all, I'm just thinking, oh God, please never let me be like this.
Merlin: Well, you know, if you bring the grades up, then... And it goes on.
Merlin: But then eventually, once they'd gotten through all the things that they knew they had to talk about that the girl had done wrong, the mother started asking her these kind of elliptical questions about how she'd been spending her time.
Merlin: And it became apparent that before the call, the mother had gone through every piece of social media that the girl was involved with and was now basically cross-examining her.
John: Right, checking up based on what she already knew.
Merlin: Yeah, and she would only let out enough information about a certain thing and then wait for the daughter to kind of offer something up.
Merlin: And it went on for an hour.
Wow.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So that's, you know, that's parenting right there.
Merlin: That's like pow.
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: It's, you know, that's, it was rough.
John: I'm so sorry.
Merlin: It's all right.
Merlin: You know, it's, it's, what are you going to do?
Merlin: It's a, it's, it's travel, but you know, at the end of a trip, especially you're kind of like, okay, I'm really ready to not be on a trip anymore.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Get me home.
John: Right.
John: And, and instead you are, you're learning about people you don't want to learn about.
John: Oh,
John: Don't ask me about the United Lounge, buddy.
John: Whoa.
John: I heard, you know, I, so full disclosure, I showed up at this airport, this Fort Lauderdale airport several hours later for a flight that was scheduled to leave, you know, at what?
John: Six.
John: A flight that, and when I left this, and so I show up at the airport and Merlin is still there with his whole family and
John: And then my flight leaves on time and Merlin is still there.
John: Bye, Merlin.
Merlin: So it was... There's tons of snow in Boston.
Merlin: There'd been huge delays.
Merlin: And also it was a day that the cruise ship defecates all of the people out of its bowels and sends them on their way through this tiny little airport.
Merlin: Plus there'd been like some kind of crazy bike race that day.
Merlin: And it'd just been kind of a clusterfuck all around for everybody.
Merlin: But yeah, the place was full of people from the cruise, like standing around charging things and talking.
John: Well, this is the funny thing about now having been on, I'm not sure whether I'm proud to say, I guess I'm proud to say, although there's an asterisk in there somewhere, but proud to say that I've done seven pleasure cruises now.
John: And one of the insights I have gleaned is that the first time you get off a cruise and you try and make it through Fort Lauderdale or through Orlando Port, whatever the freaking port up there is called, you try and make it through to the airport, and
John: You have that feeling of, like, oh, my God, an entire cruise ship just emptied out, and now this town is trying to deal with this, like, amazing, like, unprecedented influx of people.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like, you know, in the beginning of Godfather II, all the immigrants are, like, standing around, you know, waiting to move.
John: And the guy is talking to you, and you only speak Italian, and then he stamps you on the forehead and puts you in the isolation.
Merlin: So you're going to sit in a room and swing your legs and sing to yourself.
John: Yeah.
John: But what I realized over time is that every single day in Fort Lauderdale, five cruise ships dock and empty out.
John: Which has, in our case, have, I think, 4,000 passengers.
John: Yeah.
John: But this happens every single day and has for 15 years.
John: So the fact is that the whole purpose of the Fort Lauderdale airport is to... It is like the... It's the lower intestine...
John: Of this whole process.
John: It's the last piece of the bowel.
John: And it's just squeezing.
John: These poops through.
John: Like here comes a cruise ship.
John: And it just like.
John: Squeezes them out into their airplanes.
John: Like there's no purpose.
John: Like all the roads in Fort Lauderdale.
John: That whole container yard.
John: All those different people.
John: With like different security badges.
John: That are yelling at you.
John: When you walk out of the cruise ship terminal.
John: The whole process.
John: That happens five times a day every day.
John: And so the first time you do it, you're like, well, I understand why these people seem incompetent and why this process is so janky.
John: Because how would you process 4,000 people all at once?
Merlin: Just a raw ton of – I mean, I felt it.
Merlin: You know, we did the lifeboat drills on the first day where you go out and you learn where your lifeboat is.
Merlin: And it's just pretty perfunctory, but it's enough to at least know where to go.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: And even that whole thing was pretty well organized.
Merlin: All you got to do is get people on a boat.
Merlin: But on the morning, the debarking or whatever you call of pooping out the passengers, it started at like, what, like seven in the morning and went on to like noon because there's so many people in so many bags, so much custom, so much to coordinate.
Merlin: It takes hours and hours and hours to get people off in a peaceful fashion.
John: Yeah, it's crazy, except if you did it every day, in which case it would presumably over time stop being crazy and start being a matter of course.
John: And yet it never, ever is, right?
John: Like we got off the boat and we're there and they're sending us through customs.
John: And it's like, hey, you guys know at a certain hour, you can't miss the boat.
John: Here it comes, right?
John: Here it comes.
John: And at a certain hour, you're going to have 4,000 people that want to get off this boat all at the same time.
Merlin: So how... There's nobody who's happy about having to wait about any aspect of it.
John: Right.
John: I mean, if you knew that this was going to happen, how would you design a system to accommodate it?
John: And...
John: And yet every time, and I'm sure this is true of every ship because it's been true for all seven boats that I've gotten off of, every time it seems like the people there that are running the system are like, what?
John: Oh, shit.
John: Is that boat here already?
John: Oh, shit.
John: Fuck.
John: Well, we should open two lanes and at least two lanes.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: There's a number of apertures that could have been a lot wider at every step of the way.
John: Like, for instance, the global entry system.
John: which the Customs and TSA have spent millions and millions of dollars implementing this global entry system, which allows passengers who are in the program, including myself,
John: to speed through customs on their reentry into a port or into the country.
Merlin: That's because you've been vetted and checked out, and you're not risky.
John: Yeah, and you have assured the government that you do not intend to bring any vermin-infested breadfruit back into the country and then immediately throw it on the ground.
John: Like you have proved to them that you are just a normal person who is neither a drug smuggler nor an Al-Qaeda operative.
John: And so you do not need to be retina scanned again.
John: by some person who passed a job interview in Florida for a security job.
John: And yet, the first time that I arrived at the terminal on my first cruise ever, I was like, where's your global entry system?
John: And they're like, oh, we don't have those in cruise terminals.
John: I was like, really?
John: It's just the simplest thing.
John: It's like a couple of ATMs over on the side, and then 10% of this job would go away.
John: Yeah.
John: Nope, we just don't have them.
John: And so for seven years or five years, I've been waiting for them to, and they just, it's just not a thing.
Merlin: I mean, they have... It would benefit them.
Merlin: It's not something where you're saying, I want to be a fancy lad.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: It's something that would help the entire process.
John: It's part of the system that they've already built for exactly this job.
John: And I'm sure they have global entry at the Boise International Airport for the 15 people that come from Calgary every day on the, you know, in a de Havilland beaver.
John: They probably have a global entry kiosk there.
John: But for the cruise ship terminal where five ships disgorge 4,000 passengers each, they do not.
John: What they have there is like some traffic cones, some retirees who they've pinned some Western Airlines wings on their shirt and said, you're in charge of security.
Right.
John: And then we're all just standing in line as though it's never happened before.
John: It's just fascinating to me.
Merlin: It's exactly right.
Merlin: It's funny because having gone through customs coming in and out of other countries via plane, there's something about it that's very serious.
Merlin: And when you do that in an airport, there's all kinds of like, you know, it's really, I want to say tense, not just personally tense, but it's like you have to take this real seriously.
Merlin: Like you really want to fill your form out right.
Merlin: Everybody here is very professional.
Merlin: They're moving, you know, a pace.
John: Because the number one way that people bring AK-47s into the United States is via a KLM flight.
John: From Amsterdam.
Merlin: Yeah, or me coming in from Canada, I'm going to want to have some guns.
Merlin: But the line is obviously, it's very long, but it's sensible, as in it can be understood.
Merlin: And I don't mean this as a complaint, except to say this giant hangar.
Merlin: that you go through when you get off the, you get off the boat, you get shuttled down and you go into the longest line you've ever been in your life.
Merlin: But the part that's funny about it is it really seems like the regular building wasn't available that day.
Merlin: Yes, that's exactly right.
John: And you know, you know that that building was built for no other purpose.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And yet it feels repurposed.
Merlin: Like the cue, they cue you by making you walk through rows of chairs in a waiting room at first, which is kind of weird.
Yeah.
Merlin: And then you go and you wait in another line.
Merlin: It's not a complaint as much as just saying it's funny that that amount of pure infrastructure that has to be dealt with at least once a week, and I'm guessing a lot more, it seems like it would be a little bit better thought out.
Merlin: And then you get to the end and you realize, oh, this line is really long because there's like three people taking care of this.
John: And they're mad.
John: The whole system.
John: And then you do.
John: You get to the Fort Lauderdale Airport and it's like, oh, how would this – how would we ever have imagined?
John: The 4,000 people descend on this airport all at once.
John: And this is the crazy thing because the first couple of times I did it, I really did – I really was sympathetic to the whole – I was sympathetic to Fort Lauderdale, right?
Merlin: Well, also, Fort Lauderdale, that's like the king of spring break.
Merlin: Their whole city is about people moving through their city for just a little bit of time.
John: Right.
John: 80,000 people a day probably come there right now, starting right now.
John: So, and the funny thing is, I have found the town of Fort Lauderdale to be actually fairly charming.
John: In the sense that, you know those art galleries that sell, like...
John: Maybe half scale, but just big enough that you think, is that life size?
John: But it's not.
John: It's just slightly scaled down, maybe one half or one third scale.
John: Bronze statues of an elf riding a dragon on a globe.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Kind of like the sort of thing you see kind of near Union Square.
Merlin: Lots of things in Bisque.
Merlin: Or lots of, you know what I mean?
Merlin: There's lots of figurines.
Merlin: There could be magical creatures.
Merlin: But that's it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: People must really want to buy those when they travel.
John: Well, and the thing is, and then you look at it and it's $75,000.
John: Yes.
John: And you're like, this is an incredible, this statue of this elf riding a dragon on top of a globe made out of actual bronze.
Yes.
John: That stands 8 feet tall and costs $75,000.
John: This is a thing that some... I don't doubt that someone made it.
John: I don't for a second question the impulse of someone making it.
Right.
John: But then every other step of the way, like it got transported here by someone, and now an art gallery owner thought to make it his centerpiece, and people come by and look at it until one day somebody says, I must have that.
Merlin: Yeah, like an oligarch maybe comes through and goes, I must have this elf.
John: Yes, right, but an oligarch comes through Fort Lauderdale on his way to vacation, and he's like...
John: This is amazing.
John: I must have this in my mansion.
John: The dragon is exquisite.
John: I am the dragon, or I am the elf.
John: And Fort Lauderdale is full of that kind of art gallery.
John: Not just Thomas Kincaid, the painter of light, but all of Thomas Kincaid's spiritual and artistic peers.
John: Other painters of light, painters of dark...
John: painters of painters that use both light and dark in their paintings and and so the town there's there's not a lot to recommend the town you would think until you take the whole of fort lauderdale into your into your conscience conscious yeah and then i i found it remarkable and wonderful
Merlin: Yeah, it's – what you're describing, first of all, I mean there is this certain kind of – this is what travel does.
Merlin: It exposes you to things you never see or things you never think about.
Merlin: And for me, that is the – partly the wide world of what people perceive of as high-end art.
Merlin: The perceived high-end art that was on display on this cruise for the big auction, the big art auction, was some of the most amazing stuff I've ever seen in my life.
Merlin: Because it was kind of like – it had the aesthetic.
Merlin: That's what you're describing because this is common.
Merlin: And as you know, in San Francisco, gosh, Las Vegas, everywhere you go in Las Vegas, you see this kind of epic –
Merlin: like beyond kitschy art but that's meant to be very very high end the painting is never just a painting it's got like inch thick impasto like you can practically feel it you know it's you know here's here's seven seven paintings of muhammad ali and garfield the cat or something but it takes it has this the aesthetic of a like sky mall in some ways that kind of like you know like you can have a zombie crawling out of the ground on in your backyard or something like that but it has that like a face on a tree
Merlin: Yeah, but that over real aesthetic, but a little cartoony and much bigger than life and insanely expensive given how ridiculously tacky it is.
Merlin: But it's everywhere.
Merlin: People must be buying it.
John: Do you remember when we were kids, so much of what we experienced when we were kids was...
John: The hangover of the 60s.
Merlin: Oh, God, yes.
Merlin: It's like the Spencer Gifts kind of effect.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: All the stuff, all the furniture in the waiting rooms of places, all the art.
Merlin: It really was stuck in what felt like a five or eight year aesthetic.
Merlin: Everything's kind of brown and orange, carpet-y and metal-y, maybe some weird dark wood.
John: Do you remember, for whatever reason, and this may just be my experience, but I remember feeling like, well, first of all, Spain had been very popular sometime in the 50s.
John: And so there was a lot of Toreador art.
John: There was a lot of heavy Spanish, neo-Spanish looking furniture in places.
John: But a lot of this thick painted furniture.
John: Like super thick coatings of oil.
Merlin: Yeah, and maybe like oversized wooden chairs.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But the aesthetic was meant to be at once opulent and rustic.
Merlin: I'm putting this poorly.
Merlin: But that feeling of like the word that comes to mind is antiqued.
Merlin: It was meant to feel very old and portentous and rich.
Right.
John: Yeah, like maybe... The Torredors were everywhere, though.
John: Torredors were everywhere.
John: I'm with you, yeah.
John: But also, it was supposed to be... Is it like Hacienda or Spanish?
John: It wasn't Spanish colonial.
John: It was like...
John: It was Spain, not Spain in the New World.
John: Spain like in the Zorro days.
John: Zorro!
John: Thank you.
John: But Zorro was Latin America, right?
Merlin: Zorro mostly takes place in California, but of course he goes to school as a kid in Spain, and that aesthetic is very much in place.
Merlin: Yes, right.
Merlin: Zorro.
Merlin: It's hard to put a finger on, but yet I know exactly what you mean.
Merlin: All kinds of Latin influence, though, but also Italian, like that Italian restaurant kind of feeling.
John: Except with an El Cid or a Don Quixote figure in it.
Merlin: But it should look old, but it should also feel very luxe, like fake luxe.
John: Yeah, old luxe, Spanish, Italianate.
John: So I feel like that, when I was a kid, I remember, everybody's so fascinated and fixated on mid-century modern.
John: Yeah.
John: And imagining that they're all going to live in the glass house with no decoration and just these really minimal, low-slung couches and chairs.
John: But they forget that – I think my generation, my parents thought that looked cheap.
Merlin: I thought they thought it was – they would buy something very inexpensive that looked fake, luxurious.
Merlin: All of our furniture was way oversized for the room that it was in.
Merlin: Way too many Barocchi, Rococo, Curlicues.
Merlin: I mean, very few things had right angles.
Merlin: It was all just bombastic.
John: Right.
John: It was Liberace furniture.
John: And people forget that the mid-century aesthetic was much more Liberace furniture.
John: A Liberace humping El Cid than it was Don Draper laying on a low-slung couch.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, what people now think of as mid-century modern, like super cheap versions of stuff like that were what you would get from S&H green stamps.
Merlin: It wasn't what you would use to appoint your house if you were an up-and-coming lower-middle-class person.
John: But so I feel like what you're, I feel exactly your experience of Cruise Art, which is that it is the spiritual descendant of that like opulent, like fake opulent, vaguely Mediterranean
John: aesthetic that I look at and I'm just like, this is one step away from doe-eyed children.
Merlin: You're absolutely right.
Merlin: And it's funny you should say that.
Merlin: And also think about how hot most of the colors are in these paintings.
Merlin: They're always, and again, I can't get away from thinking about Sky Mall, thinking about when I was a kid, it was Spencer's, but also there's one store called Gallagher's that were basically like head shops.
Merlin: You remember the stores and the malls when we were kids, right?
Merlin: They were kind of like, it was a head shop, head shop,
Merlin: It started as a head shop mostly.
Merlin: Peaches, Peaches Record Store.
Merlin: Peaches, sure, sure.
Merlin: But you could get your posters.
Merlin: You could get your slightly off-color bachelor party gifts there.
Merlin: You could get the little balls that clank into each other and go back and forth.
John: You know what I bought at one of those?
Hmm.
John: One of my favorite of all time things.
John: And I got this in probably 78.
John: It was a maybe three foot tall, like punching dummy.
John: Remember these?
John: It was like a stress, meant to be like a stress reducer.
John: Yeah, stress reducer.
John: It was weighted on the bottom.
John: It was blow up.
Merlin: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: Look kind of like a clown or something like that.
John: Yeah, it was in the shape of, it was in the shape of a schmoo.
John: except it was called kick tricky dick and it had it had richard nixon it was richard nixon uh screen printed on it on both front and back like like his face was front facing you and then the back of his head was you know they had gone to the trouble of doing two designs and it was a basically a three foot tall blow up
John: No, maybe taller, three and a half feet, blow-up doll of Richard Nixon that you were meant to kick when you were mad.
John: Wow.
John: And I got it at a head shop in a mall, and I was so proud of it.
John: I got it at a head shop in a mall in 1978.
John: That's politically relevant, though.
John: And I was so proud of this thing, and I kept it.
John: It was displayed prominently in my room.
John: I haven't thought about that in years.
Merlin: My God.
Merlin: I bought a lot of posters.
Merlin: I would buy presents for Mother's Day.
Merlin: I would buy World's Greatest Mom figurines for my mom there.
Merlin: But there was a kind of – but you get what I'm saying?
Merlin: The overriding aesthetic though was –
Merlin: I mean, tacky is the wrong word for it.
Merlin: You know, you joke a lot about the app class guys having a poster of a girl in a Lamborghini.
Merlin: That's the only thing they've got in their $50 million house.
Merlin: It's not so far from that kind of aesthetic in some ways, though, where it's like, I need to go buy some things to put in here to make this place classy.
John: Yeah, right, right, right, right, right.
John: Like, yeah, I know enough, I know just enough to know that my 14,000 square foot house looks unlived in because I only live in the kitchen and the TV room.
John: Like, I had a pretty good friend who made some rock and roll money, and he had never, you know, he'd lived with his parents until he was in a rock band, and then all of a sudden was rich.
John: And he bought a really big house for himself, mid-century modern.
John: But he didn't know how to... He hadn't fully domesticated himself, and he was kind of waiting, I think, to get married.
John: He lived in this five-bedroom house, and he had...
John: He had one room.
John: He had a bed in his bedroom.
John: And then he had some kind of folding chairs in the living room.
John: A place for people to sit.
John: That's nice.
John: And then he had a game room.
John: With the biggest TV you could buy at the time and all of the stuff that he cared about.
John: And when we would go over there, it was very difficult to have a party there because, first of all, there was no place to sit.
John: And second of all, there was nothing to look at.
John: But we would sometimes go there for poker games or whatever.
John: But I would imagine him coming home on those days when he was just by himself.
John: Like, come in, throw his keys in the key jar, stand in the entry, and look, survey, like, the thousands of square feet at his disposal, and then, like, right into the game room, close the door.
John: And I couldn't tell whether it was sad or wonderful.
Hmm.
John: I'm still not sure.
John: He's married now and he lives in a beautiful home that is beautifully decorated.
Merlin: You know, when you're trying to... I mean, and again, I feel like I can speak with some...
Merlin: authority on this coming from a, you know, lower to middle class, lower, lower middle class.
Merlin: I mean, we weren't like, you know, impoverished, but we didn't have a lot of dough.
Merlin: And, you know, my parents, uh, born in the, you know, late twenties, early thirties, but like, there was definitely this sense of like, uh,
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It's almost like the kind of thing you'd see like in a Martin Scorsese movie of where people are trying to bring these things into their life that will – like I guess we all try to do this.
Merlin: Bring in something that says something about who you're becoming, right?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: It isn't like you certainly don't want your parents' furniture.
Merlin: You want your own.
Merlin: And so you get this very, very inexpensive furniture that is meant to be extremely fancy.
Merlin: So in our case, I remember in 1976, we bought this French Rococo furniture for the house.
Merlin: Everything was French Rococo.
Merlin: And it really kind of looked like something out of Goodfellas.
Merlin: But it was all so poorly made.
Merlin: It was mostly hollow wood.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But it was supposed to – it had all those curly cues that you would hope would denote a certain kind of fanciness.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Did you guys have that?
Merlin: What did you guys have?
John: Well, so when my mom left my dad –
John: We moved down to Seattle and in the perfect expression of who she was and what her aspirations were, she outfitted our house.
John: We had no money.
John: She outfitted our house with furniture that I cannot even begin to describe, except I will now try.
Merlin: Was it new or used?
Merlin: It was brand new.
Merlin: You get really good credit at those places, John.
Merlin: You can basically fill a room.
John: But now think about who my mom is.
John: She's not going to... She's very practical.
John: She's not going to go in debt to some usurious credit situation at a furniture store.
John: So our furniture, and I'm talking about our entire house, was red painted paper towel tubes.
John: that were connected with little plastic L-shaped connectors.
John: So you'd take a paper towel tube, you'd stick a connector in it, and then it would L, and you'd stick another paper towel tube in the... Not literally.
John: Well, no, they were poster tubes.
Merlin: Oh.
John: So... Oh, almost like pool furniture?
Merlin: Was it casual, like lounge?
Merlin: Except literally made out of cardboard.
Oh.
John: Oh, my God.
John: So the Ls, and a lot of the joints were three-way, right?
John: So you'd have one in the top tube and then two at a 90-degree angle to one another to make the two sides of a table.
John: And you would just build these cubes out of...
John: Poster tubes.
John: And the poster tubes were just big enough that a child could stick their hand inside the tube.
John: Yeah.
John: Literally like poster tubes that had been painted red.
John: And then the plastic parts were white.
John: And then over the top of... So you'd build a cube out of that.
John: And then there was a piece of plastic like whiteboard color.
John: that you would put over the top of it, and that was your coffee table.
John: And then you would make another cube, or these were your end tables, and then there was a long cube, which we call a rectangle, a long low rectangle, that was your main coffee table.
John: And then there was actually furniture that you could sit on made out of these cardboard tubes.
John: uh that what you know that's by combining the right combination of these um you know these plastic adapters and whatnot that you could make a thing strong enough to hold an adult and this was our living room furniture and for a long time was it i mean what did you build them you was it modular where you'd buy the pieces and put it together yourself
John: Yeah.
John: Wow.
John: And just because of the nature of it, you were building them and rebuilding them every single day.
John: Because as a kid, right, you could take the furniture apart.
John: And as an adult, I think people would sit down and be like, this furniture is made out of cardboard tubes.
John: And they would take it apart just out of fascination.
John: Sure.
John: And then put it back together and be like, well, that's really amazing.
John: Yeah.
John: And it was amazing, and I can't believe that... I mean, because it couldn't have been cheaper to produce.
John: I can't believe that it's not still a feature, except that it would be terrible dorm room furniture, because the first time somebody got drunk and leaned on something, it would be destroyed.
John: Wow.
John: You had to be somewhat ginger...
John: It's not like you could climb on the coffee table, right?
John: I mean, it would break in 700 ways.
John: But this was her solution.
John: She needed furniture for our house, and she found this.
John: There's a part of me at the time that thought maybe she had just gone to the drugstore and bought a bunch of stuff and painted it herself.
John: But it had a quality where this was somebody's business plan.
John: Somebody had thought this up.
John: And this was a product they were selling.
John: I've never seen it anywhere else.
John: And what's amazing is that a few of those furniture items stayed with us all the way through to the mid-80s.
John: We still had a couple of those end tables.
John: And...
John: They played another role in my life, formative role.
John: Did you make a bong?
John: No, terrible bong stuff.
John: But the coffee table was the first thing to go because it's a big, long coffee table right in front of the couch.
John: You want to put big books on it, but more importantly, you want to put your feet on it.
John: And this thing was just not strong enough to have somebody put their feet up on the coffee table.
John: And so the coffee table was the thing that seemed like... The tubes were just too long to support... The first time some guy came over and threw his feet up there, it just started to sag.
John: And so when I was learning my multiplication tables, my mom decided that...
John: she was going to sacrifice the coffee table what remained of the coffee table she was going to sacrifice to this project and so she took the top off the coffee table leaned it up against the wall and made a giant and with a black marker made a giant times tables on it wow and we would sit and study our times tables i mean she already knew them but we would sit and i would study my times tables on this giant
John: coffee table piece of plastic and then I think it went back on the coffee table the remaining you know the sort of end end life of the coffee table it would go you know face down and we continued to use it as a table for a while and then we would flip it up and do our times tables
John: And then eventually, like, it all went to the landfill.
John: Man, your mom's a maverick.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, you know, you got to listen, man.
John: Waste not, want not.
John: She used every part of the buffalo.
Merlin: Bye.
Merlin: Bye.
Merlin: Bye.
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Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I found some – my daughter is getting to that age where she likes looking at old pictures, like old family pictures.
Merlin: And she found a bunch the other night, actually last night, that confirmed something I thought I was misremembering.
Merlin: But that we were actually one of those families that on the nice furniture –
Merlin: we would always put plastic.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Sure you did.
Merlin: Because you lived in Ohio.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It was something everybody did.
Merlin: Once you arrived, and I don't know, this is not super interesting, but I do remember back then, everybody would arrive at a point where I get, not everybody, but it was not uncommon to arrive at a point where you had a place that you were renting, and
Merlin: And maybe you're making a little more money than before.
Merlin: You're mostly making ends meet.
Merlin: And I seem, I really feel like I remember the furniture companies being very aggressive about things like, okay, no money down or small money down and you can get this entire room, this suite.
Merlin: So of course, when we did arrive at that point,
Merlin: By the mid-70s, we had to really take care of everything.
Merlin: So this appalling couch that we had that replaced our old appalling couch, I do remember my mom putting a plastic cover on it that made it really, really uncomfortable and really quite ugly.
Merlin: But you had to keep the couch nice.
Merlin: That was just the kind of thing that we did.
Merlin: Our family was a cover-the-furniture family.
John: It's interesting because we definitely were not, and I would go to people's houses that had covered the furniture and was told that it was like... What I always assumed was that you left the covers on the furniture until guests came, special guests, and then you took the covers off.
John: Stands to reason.
John: But no one ever took the covers off.
John: And then when my mom got a good job,
John: And moved to Alaska.
John: And I was already living in Alaska with my dad.
John: And all of a sudden, my mom is living in Alaska, too, and has a nicer house than my dad.
John: And it was like, whoa, times have changed.
John: Fortunes have switched around.
John: And then my mom moved again into a much nicer house in the nice neighborhood, no less.
John: And she had leveraged herself pretty highly at that point, specifically to get her dream home in a nice neighborhood.
John: And it was right before I was going into high school.
John: She timed it all very purposefully.
John: Oh.
John: So that during the time that I was in high school, we lived in the nice neighborhood.
Right.
John: And in a nice house in that neighborhood.
John: So she was fulfilling her own dream and also trying to facilitate my path through life.
Merlin: I mean, if I'm not reading too much into this, to get you into a good school.
John: Well, the schools in Anchorage were sort of all about the same.
John: It was that she didn't want me to go, or rather...
John: She perceived that if she lived in the nice neighborhood and I started high school from the nice neighborhood, that I would have a social leg up.
John: That I wouldn't be going home on the school bus to the poor neighborhood.
John: I would be living in the rich neighborhood with the rich kids who were going to go to the good schools.
John: It was a move that was conscious of the social...
John: undercurrents and and she was playing up it was a part of her fantasy too both to have the nice house and to be the mother of a kid who's you know she was the only single parent in that whole neighborhood wow everybody else was uh you know married with kids and they ostracized her for being a single woman
John: who was presumably there, you know, the women all... That was a real thing.
John: Yeah.
John: The women all presumed that she was there to steal their husbands.
John: And, you know, and the neighbor, the local husbands, the neighbor men would come by on Saturday afternoon and stand there with their rake, you know, like it was... Stand there with their rake, like, how's it going over here?
John: Do you need any help?
John: You know, like it was... There was weirdness about being a single woman, particularly a single mother.
John: And I heard from a lot of kids, like...
John: The way kids repeat the things that they hear at their dinner table.
John: Just that all the suspicion and fear about a woman living on her own with two kids and a nice house.
John: It was like, you know, my mom was...
John: She was very definitely standing with her head held high and her chin out.
John: Like, yeah, that's right.
John: I bought the corner house on Stanford and Princeton.
John: And I'm a single mom and fuck you.
John: And of course...
John: i loved being in the in the rich neighborhood right it was it was um although i although i learned to hate it because rich kids are assholes yeah but at the time it seemed like a real a real positive that's not a one-time thing where once you're in the neighborhood we've talked about at length i mean now you need the right alligator on your shirt oh yeah and i didn't and you know and so she was not willing having gotten the nice house she was not willing to
John: put an alligator on one of my shirts.
John: That's not sustainable.
John: Not in a million years.
John: She still maintained her farm ethics.
John: She was going to repurpose the coffee table multiple times, but what she did do was buy a set of furniture for the living room that we were not allowed to sit on.
John: And it was the first time anything like that had ever happened.
John: Like all of a sudden, we weren't allowed in the living room.
John: And I was like, what am I?
John: A fucking cat?
John: I'm allowed in the goddamn living room.
John: I am the son of this house.
John: I'm the scion of this legacy.
John: And I would go in and sit in the living room and she would come in and say, get off those couches.
John: Hit me with the spray bottle.
John: Shoot.
John: And so for several years there, after we moved into that house, we had a living room.
John: And the thing is that the furniture she bought was like light pink verging into white.
John: And we weren't allowed to go in there except on Christmas morning.
John: And if somebody came by, which she made every attempt to prevent ever happening,
John: No one ever came by.
John: She never had anybody over for tea.
John: She kept the blinds closed.
John: And I think she would go in at night and stand in the doorway of her perfect living room, and it gave her a tremendous satisfaction.
John: But I guess she had finally purchased a house that was big enough that there could be a room in the house that no one used.
John: And...
John: The American dream.
John: That's right.
John: And then she set up this room in her perfect vision of what that looked like, and then she would be damned.
Merlin: And that's kind of like the historical role of the parlor, right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That room's really just for Kennedy or the Pope.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And she didn't put plastic over it, but I think she later wished she had, because when I first started drinking...
John: One of the first one of maybe in the first 20 times I drank because, you know, the first time I drank, I got shit faced.
John: And then every successive time I drank, I got shit faced.
John: There was never there was never a time when I had two beers, not a single time.
John: From the beginning?
John: From the very beginning.
John: How interesting.
John: This alcohol is amazing.
John: How much of this can I drink?
John: And I was just like, plato.
John: And so it was never explained to me and it never occurred to me that there was another way to drink alcohol.
John: beer or wine coolers or champagne or whatever was handed to me, except as much as you can get, like as much as you could get away with.
John: Oh, man.
John: And then later on, somebody suggested that we have a couple of beers.
John: And I remember just being like, what would the point of that be?
John: A couple of beers.
Yeah.
John: What are you talking about?
John: It's a start.
John: Right.
John: A couple of beers.
John: But anyway, one of those times, I came home.
John: Somebody dropped me off, got me to the front door, and ran.
John: And I made it into the front room, peed myself, took off all my clothes...
John: And then fell asleep on her pink couch.
Merlin: Oh, no, John.
John: And I woke up in the morning to her sitting in the pink chair.
Oh, God.
Merlin: And was this the first time she'd seen you drunk?
Merlin: No, she'd seen it before.
John: But what made this moment special was that my dad was also there.
John: My dad, who was not often invited into my mom's house...
John: Had been invited over.
John: And so there had been, you know, she came downstairs.
John: Obviously, she wakes up at five in the morning.
John: She came downstairs, saw me drunk with my pee clothes, you know, in a kind of fire sale path into her living room, me naked on the couch.
John: And so she, you know, woke up at five in the morning, had time to have breakfast herself, call my father, tell him to come over.
John: And then they woke me up.
John: at nine, I think woke me up by going, and then I had to hear what was the first of many alcoholism lectures from my two parents combined working together as a team.
John: It was an auspicious christening of those pink couches, let me say.
John: Did she have a way for you to make good?
John: Well, everybody was much more worried about the fact that I was recapitulating the family curse because my older brother and my father's father and my father himself had all gone down this path.
John: And I could only imagine...
John: If, you know, if you're a 15-year-old kid, I mean, talk about calling them on the phone from the Fort Lauderdale Airport and checking their story against their Facebook posts.
John: If your 15-year-old kid is, like, not just coming home drunk, but you know what the end game of this story is, they were super worried.
John: How'd you feel?
John: Well, I feel like two things.
John: It never occurred to me that I was anything but an alcoholic.
John: From the very beginning, from the first time I had a drink, because my dad was a recovering alcoholic from before I was born.
John: So the only time that alcohol was ever referenced, and by that I mean all the fucking time, because growing up in Alaska in the 70s, it was like...
John: Dodge City, right?
John: Everybody was shit-faced all the time.
John: People would go out to lunch and come back to their job running the pipeline and be like six martinis in.
John: And their job was to sit there and control the pressure of the oil running through the pipes.
John: And they're just like, I'm fine, I got it.
John: It was a culture of abuse and
John: And so I'd heard about alcohol.
John: I'd seen it.
John: I'd seen it all around me.
John: And with my dad's kind of like critique of it, which was he never talked out of the side of his mouth.
John: My dad always spoke right out of the front of his mouth.
John: But like bars were the only place that you could socialize in Alaska.
John: So we would go into bars and sit there and there'd be just people like getting in gunfights.
John: And my dad would be...
John: Walking over to them and like, you ever thought about going to Alcoholics Anonymous?
John: So the first time I ever had a drink, I knew I was an alcoholic.
John: It never occurred to me that I wasn't.
John: And my performance as a young drinker reinforced that I was.
John: And so when my parents woke me up that morning, we're like, you are exhibiting the signs of being an alcoholic.
John: It's a very bad road to be on.
John: And you need to really take a hard look at it.
John: I was like, asked and answered.
John: I've already taken a hard look at it.
John: I'm an alcoholic.
John: What's next?
John: Where do I, you know, like, where do I sign up for the alcoholic adventure?
John: And I don't think anybody, I don't think they had the, I don't think they anticipated that.
John: And I'm not sure that I actually communicated that.
John: I think what I probably did was look chastened and sort of nodded and sat there, you know, head spinning.
John: I was like, I'm sorry, I'll try not to do it again.
John: And I basically said, I'm sorry, I'll try not to do it again for 10 or 12 more years.
Yeah.
John: And no one in my life ever realized that I knew I was a fucking alcoholic, and I was trying to plumb the depths of that.
John: I was trying to find what I knew about the concept of a bottom, and I was like, let's see if I can find mine.
John: Really?
John: At 15?
Merlin: Yeah, because there's that other side of... I never knew that, in your case, that it was really like zero to a hundred kind of thing.
Merlin: I figured it was typical kind of high school, maybe escalating a little more, big on the weekends.
Merlin: But from the beginning, for you, it was all or nothing.
John: Yeah, and it was always crazy to me.
John: I remember the first time I was sitting in an AA meeting and listening to, you know, everybody's going around and gets to this guy and he's like, you know, I don't know why I'm here.
John: He's probably 30.
John: I don't know why I'm here.
John: I mean...
John: Oh, I know why I'm here because the cops are making me come here because I got five DUIs.
John: And the whole meeting just breaks up.
John: Everybody's laughing.
John: And the guy's like, what are you fucking laughing about?
John: And somebody's like, dude, if you got five DUIs.
John: That's the times they caught him.
John: Those are the times they caught him, right?
John: Five prosecuted DUIs where they've taken your license.
John: Right.
John: um you have a drinking problem and the guy's like what are you even talking about i just go drink like a normal person and it was this it was this like dawning realization you saw it on his face as people are like very gently kind of and you know most aa meetings there's not cross talk but this guy was inviting it and it was like cross talks when other people comment about comment on what you're saying right and that's generally frowned on
John: It's not part of the culture, right?
John: You just – you say your piece and then the next person says their piece.
Merlin: And even if the next person like obliquely refers to what you just said, it's – Is crosstalk also where people could potentially say that sounds like bullshit?
Merlin: You're not really supposed to do that, right?
John: You're not supposed to do that, no.
John: Okay.
John: If the person is saying bullshit –
John: The presumption is that if they stick around in AA meetings long enough, they're one day going to be like, holy shit, I have been full of shit all this time.
Merlin: Because everybody else has probably tried the same route and that hasn't worked.
John: There's nothing new in those meetings, right?
John: And what often happens is the next person to talk or somewhere down the road, some old timer will be like, well, basically talk about themselves.
John: And say to the effect something like, I remember when I was full of shit.
John: And it was a really hard experience when I realized it.
John: Because I'd been in AA for four years before I realized that everything that had come out of my mouth was bullshit.
John: And everybody in the room nods.
John: And you just hope that the person that...
John: needs to hear that can hear it but of course they can't right that's what's amazing about those meetings is that everybody just says what's on their mind and you just go and sometimes somebody will open their mouth the first word they that comes out of the mouth you're just like this guy is going to give us 15 minutes of the worst self-justifying bullshit and there's nothing we can do it's part of the meeting we just said after a few months or years of that there must be certain kinds of
Merlin: types like you must you must see a certain kind of like well I can tell that person's in this particular phase right now yeah it's the it's the five stages of grief or whatever it's the same same type of thing and you just but somebody might go there for a really long time not really wanting to be there and it isn't like everybody gets there in the first week they break down and go oh you know I'm I see the light now
John: No, you can go to AA for years and not do anything.
Merlin: That must be so weird to have so many people in different states of... I mean, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Am I all wrong?
Merlin: It seems like there must be people in incredibly different phases of all sorts of aspects of that process, and it must be very weird.
John: It's really weird, particularly since one of the dominant characteristics of alcoholics is that they want to tell everybody how to do it.
John: So that's baked into the concept, right?
John: Everybody in the room...
John: is sitting there quietly and in their own minds saying, oh, fuck, if I could just stand up right now and explain why this person is doing it wrong.
John: And so everybody, I mean, because that is an alcoholic trait to be the expert.
John: And so it's, I mean, that's what makes, that's why I'm a supporter of that program.
John: It is a fascinating thing.
John: like, multifaceted experiment in psychology.
Merlin: It seems like you have to find, like, completely unknown and untapped levels, new levels of humility for that to be something you stick with and progress with.
Merlin: It seems like you've got to constantly find a new level of humility.
John: It's the core.
John: It's the core of it.
John: It's why it works, right?
John: Because the people that manage to get there are basically...
John: Experiencing the toughest route to Zen, which is being confronted every day with people who are exhibiting all the things about yourself that you hate the most and not being able to do anything except listen.
Yeah.
John: You know, every single person in an AA meeting wants to take it over and be the chief.
John: And no one can.
Merlin: It's somewhere they are right then.
John: Yeah.
John: No one can.
John: It's based on... And there's somebody that's got 30 years of sobriety.
John: There's somebody that's got 40 years of sobriety.
John: And, you know, and there's somebody that's got 60 days of sobriety and they want to take the meeting over and tell everybody how to do it.
John: And it's just like, yeah, man.
Merlin: What do they call that phase...
Merlin: what's the cloud, pink cloud or something like that?
Merlin: Isn't there a phase like when you first stop drinking and you start to feel a lot better and like you get this... I don't know.
Merlin: I know there's a lot of nomenclature to be careful about.
Merlin: I don't want to abuse it.
Merlin: But isn't there something everybody goes through where you first get off it and then you start to feel like you're feeling better and you're feeling sober and then everybody goes through this phase where they think, aha, now I've got it.
John: Yeah, yeah, right.
John: And for me, it happened about...
John: between three and six months where you're just like at six months you feel like fuck had you been not drinking for six months or six months in program
John: I mean, there were multiple times that I quit drinking for six months, but the final time when I was really going to Alcoholics Anonymous all the time and was trying to be sober instead of just being forced to be sober or experimenting with being sober.
John: But I was like, okay, I have been to the edge.
John: I've stood and looked down.
John: I lost a lot of friends there.
John: And so I'm like, I'm in this to win this, or at least I'm trying to make it through.
John: And at six months, I was just like, I feel amazing.
John: I've got this thing on lock.
John: And then invariably, right, you come to the next hurdle, which is that it's not a thing you can ever really have on lock.
John: You have to...
John: Just do it every morning.
Merlin: Even if you're not drinking again, you still – because I mean it seems like there's also obviously like the backsliding or whatever.
Merlin: But then there's that sense that it's not uncommon to have a sense to feel like you've turned the corner.
Merlin: There's no way you could go back at this point.
Merlin: That's a common thing, right?
John: Very common.
John: And the next thing that comes out of your mouth is, and since it's impossible that I could ever go back, there's no reason why I shouldn't have one drink.
Merlin: One drink, yeah.
John: Because it's fucking New Year's Eve or whatever, and there's no way I am going to ever be an alcoholic again.
John: So what's the harm in having one little tiny drink?
Merlin: I've never thought about that the way you're described.
Merlin: It's such a fascinating organization to me.
Merlin: And the work that they do is, you know, so incredible, but so weird.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because now, and the reason I'm thinking of this is it's like, you think about, this is not much of a change of topic, but if you're ever trying to like help somebody who you know is really fucking wrong and really stupid.
Merlin: And the example here being like, look at me or you when we were teenagers, full stop.
Merlin: And it's a lot like being an alcoholic because you feel like you – first of all, you know you better than anybody, obviously.
Merlin: You know what you've struggled with.
Merlin: You know what you've gotten through.
Merlin: And who is more fucking dangerous than a 15-year-old boy who thinks he's figured it out for now?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And if they even want to be helped.
Merlin: And I say here, why a teenager?
Merlin: Because there's no way for a teenager to even know how fucked up they are.
Merlin: That their brain is not done being formed yet.
Merlin: There's the big middle part of their brain that's still just a bunch of mush.
Merlin: They're taking crazy risks.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: They're not getting enough sleep.
Merlin: There's all kinds of things that are making you a teenager.
Merlin: And you are biologically incapable of being able to see these things that everybody else in the world can see.
Merlin: Why do you keep...
Merlin: like hanging out with this group of people.
Merlin: They're obviously not good for you.
Merlin: Or why do you keep doing this self-destructive thing?
Merlin: Or why do you, why are you being so negative about these?
Merlin: You know, there's all these kinds of things.
Merlin: But the reason it reminds me of AA is it sounds like, you know, an 18 year old me would want to counsel 15 year old me a certain way.
Merlin: Cause he thinks he's got to figure it out.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Cause 18 year old me is super smart.
Merlin: I can help those kids.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: 22 year old me oh well jesus christ wait till i get to 27 because that's when i'm really fucking smart i knew everything when i was 27 and i could certainly counsel this poor bastard to be but you know it's really it's so interesting to think about everybody in the group is helping themselves and helping others partly when they the track of they're always stepping back onto is going like humility
Merlin: And like we've all got shit to learn and there's all things – even me who's been in this program for 40 years or whatever, there's still parts of this adventure that I haven't seen yet and I still have a lot to learn.
Merlin: And that's ultimately what gives me the humility to keep showing up and helping people the best I can without thinking anybody's got the fucking answer.
Merlin: I find that fascinating as an approach.
Merlin: Where else in the world do you actually see that kind of an approach to improvement of everybody going like, look, I'm only good at this when I'm not trying to be the expert at this.
John: And that is why it's a unique approach.
John: thought experiment in the history of humankind, right?
John: I mean, that's why AA... It's been so bastardized, and the recovery movements have swept in the land.
John: Like in the 80s and 90s when it became... Well, and even now, I mean, there are people right now who are paying $5,000 a week to be in an AA-style rehab, where ultimately it isn't AA-style, because if you have someone in charge...
John: And if you have bars on the windows or if you have any kind of coercion, then it's not AA.
John: And the courts routinely send people to Alcoholics Anonymous as part of their court punishment.
John: And those people are there and they put their little, you know, a basket goes around the room and everybody puts a dollar in just to pay for coffee.
Mm-hmm.
John: But a basket goes around the room and people put in their little green and blue and yellow slips that they get from the court so that somebody at the AA meeting signs off on it and they can take it back to their parole officer and say, yeah, I went to AA.
John: But as soon as that element is there, I don't think it's AA.
Merlin: And a judge is treating it like the way in an old movie you would treat the army or church.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Where you'd say, well, here's the thing.
Merlin: I won't find you guilty of this if you go join the army.
Merlin: Or I won't find you guilty of this if you start getting some church in you.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The idea that there is something that needs to be reformed about you, that whether you're willing or not, proximity to this group and their practices will be something that can't help but make you better than you are right now, you sorry bastard.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And it sounds like with AA, that's a completely inaccurate assumption to make.
John: Well, I don't know.
John: I mean, it is entirely possible that somebody sits in a forced AA situation for six months and goes – somewhere along the line goes, huh, this actually is getting through to me.
John: But –
John: Like, two things.
John: When you're about six months in to getting sober, at least in my experience, I remember having the feeling that, oh my God, I'm so lucky because I wish everybody in the world had to hit this moment where they needed to be in AA because it's such a...
John: It's such a fascinating and humbling experience.
John: And I have an insight now that I couldn't have had otherwise that I wish everybody shared.
John: It's like the first time you take LSD and you're like, whoa, I wish everybody in the world would take LSD one time.
John: And going to AA is very similar.
John: It's like, fuck, if everybody...
John: There are a lot of people out there laboring along, and this knowledge is so useful that I wish everybody shared it.
John: But the fundamental thing about a guy that's been sober for 40 years who keeps going to AA is that he keeps learning things about himself from listening to people who have been sober for 60 days.
Yeah.
John: Oh, wow.
John: Wow, wow, wow.
John: And that is not something you can duplicate.
John: It's not something you can package and put a price on.
John: And ultimately, the reason that he is there and subjecting himself to that, which is uncomfortable and which is like, you know, listening to somebody who's been sober for 60 days talk about how much they know...
John: if you've been sober for 40 years is just like you're just so bad and yet you're there because you want to not you because you want what whatever that is and so last year I get a phone call from some manager and there and this happens this happens periodically
John: Manager says, I know that you are sober.
John: And I go, yeah.
John: And they say, well, I've got a, one of my artists is struggling, and I'd like you to talk to them if you would.
John: And I go, of course.
John: And I get on the phone, and in this particular case, it's an artist I'd never met, but who's, you know, who was a big rock star, but younger than me.
John: and getting in a lot of trouble, drunk and so forth.
John: And he's like, yeah, my manager said I should call you.
John: And I'm like, well, do you want to stop drinking?
John: And he's like, well, I mean, I keep getting... I'm screwing up my life.
John: And I'm like, well, that doesn't mean you want to stop drinking.
John: And he's like, well, I mean, if I don't do something, I'm going to ruin my career.
John: And I'm like, that doesn't mean you want to stop drinking.
John: Look, people fucking...
John: ruin their families, destroy their kids, burn their house down.
John: Like, do you want to stop drinking?
John: And we talked six, seven, eight times late at night.
John: Most of the time he was fucked up.
Yeah.
John: And every time he wants to argue with me, he's like, well, Jim Morrison is my hero and so is Bukowski and so is Hemingway.
Merlin: He was looking to find a way to reframe the conversation while you were consistently asking exactly the same question exactly the same way.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was just like, well, yeah, Jim Morrison and Hemingway and Bukowski.
Right.
John: But what about you?
John: But do you want to stop drinking or do you not?
John: Like if you want to die like Bukowski, go for it.
John: Why are you calling me?
John: And he, you know, and he's a guy who had, who everybody in his life is like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, you've got to stop drinking, you've got to stop drinking.
John: And he, you know, they put him in touch with me, and I'm like, I don't, listen, I don't give a fuck if you stop drinking.
Merlin: So he's like, he's used to being the beautiful loser.
John: Yeah, he's the beautiful loser, and he's like, well, fucking Bukowski, man.
John: And I'm like, yeah, Bukowski, yeah, right, Bukowski, right, Hemingway, right.
John: Do you want to stop drinking or do you not?
John: If you do, then I got some recommendations and I'll talk to you on the phone as much as you want.
John: If you don't and you want to talk to me on the phone about it, I'm happy to talk to you on the phone about it.
John: But I'm not going to argue with you about how Jim Morrison is your role model.
John: You know, like, go for it.
John: Like, seriously, if you want to drink and ruin your life, it is totally beautiful.
John: It's, like, unbelievable.
John: You're like a shooting star, man.
John: But if you want to stop drinking, it sucks.
John: It's hard.
John: It's bullshit.
John: But it's a thing that you either want or you don't.
John: And if you don't, don't waste everybody's time.
John: And if you do, there are things you got to do.
John: One of them is you stop drinking.
John: And then the next thing is you take a look around.
John: And you start listening to people that have done it.
Merlin: It must be difficult because there's not really a negotiation.
Merlin: This is the way it goes, right?
John: It's so difficult.
John: And what ended up happening with this guy is that...
John: That he, you know, some drunken night called me at four o'clock in the morning and was, you know, talking to me about Bukowski.
John: And I was like, dude, I've read every Bukowski everything.
John: And I saw Bukowski at 75 years old or whatever in that documentary kick his girlfriend.
John: And Bukowski's an asshole and whatever.
John: Like, if you want to be Bukowski, why call me at 4 o'clock in the morning?
John: Call your girlfriend and tell her how Bukowski you are.
John: And he, you know, and our thing just like... Remember Charles Bukowski to keep calling people in the middle of the night to talk about Charles Bukowski?
John: What ended up happening was somebody...
John: got him into an expensive recovery program, and now he pays, my understanding is, that he pays a chaperone to tour with him.
John: He's got like a den mother?
John: Yeah.
John: Whoa.
John: And then, so his relationship to not drinking is that
John: He's basically in that Metallica situation where they're paying some guy to sit in the room with them and be like, I'm hearing you say that you love Bukowski.
John: And I'm getting paid $15,000 a week to tell you, why don't you have some hummus?
John: And, you know, just like, just something, if you see from outside, you just go, wow, this is not, it's not tenable, because as soon as he can sneak away, he's going to take two Oxycontins, and then he's going to come back, and he's going to pretend to be sorry, and he's going to...
John: And maybe he can keep that going.
John: Maybe he can keep that going through the life of his band.
Merlin: But there's nothing in anything that he said to you that made you think that he actually wanted anything to be that different.
John: No, what he wanted was the exact same... He wanted people not to bug him.
John: He wanted the exact same thing I wanted, which was to be able to drink like the people in the stories and to have all the...
John: to have all the glamorous problems of the people in the stories, which is to say the fistfights and the broken bottles and the, and the women who are so sad and weeping over you, but that he also wanted it like in the stories to result in a Pulitzer prize winning novel and a Grammy winning record that ultimately will cause everyone to forgive him and
John: And he doesn't want to wake up with a broken nose.
John: He wants to wake up having given the other guy a broken nose.
John: He has a fantasy, just like I did, of how it's going to play out.
John: And when it starts not playing out like your fantasy, you feel like all you've got to do is make some minor adjustment.
John: Maybe talk to some guy who's going to give you a couple of secrets about how you can...
John: You know, a lot of people come into AA and they're like, what's the secret that will allow me to keep drinking and partying and raging but stop waking up with a broken nose?
John: It's like, well, if you've woken up with a broken nose, you're already past the point where the secret is useful to you.
John: There isn't one.
John: But this is the problem in so much of life.
John: And this is why I always felt like AA would help people.
Yeah.
John: who weren't alcoholics, is that there are so many people whose lives start to deviate from the fantasy they had in mind.
John: And what they do is cling to the fantasy harder and harder.
John: And their lives resemble that fantasy less and less.
John: And their reaction is to just be disappointed and increasingly bitter as they frantically grasp at the fantasy of what they thought it was going to be.
Merlin: And maybe find more and more seemingly valid reasons for why they've been denied that fantasy that they kind of deserve.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: It's the man or it's – Well, it could just be people misunderstanding you, right?
Merlin: Or it could be – you know what I mean?
Merlin: But I mean the way you described like –
Merlin: That was so good.
Merlin: The idea of being the guy – you want to be the one who punches somebody in the nose, not the guy who gets punched in the nose.
Merlin: Not that either one of those is a particularly glamorous thing to be.
Merlin: But you could walk around thinking you're the guy that throws the punches when you're really the guy who's just – I mean how many more broken noses will it be?
John: Yeah, right.
John: And the thing is that for whatever... That's not your character.
Merlin: In your head, that's not your character.
John: That's exactly right.
John: Your character as... And you see this a lot.
John: You see this... I mean, this is what the whole wedding planner industry is based on.
John: You have an idea that you are the bride.
John: And the bride looks like this on her wedding day.
John: And she feels like this on her wedding day.
John: And so...
John: And suddenly you're 26 years old and you don't feel like that.
John: And then you meet somebody and you're like, okay, you are cast in the role of the prince and now you need to make me feel like I am supposed to feel on my wedding day.
John: And the prince character goes, what?
John: I'm just a guy that you met in a bar.
John: And it's like, no.
Merlin: It's like you're posing in one of those old-timey photos at an amusement park.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Put this hat on.
John: Put this hat on.
John: And now you're the groom.
John: And what your job is is to make me feel like I'm supposed to feel on my wedding day.
John: And so there's a huge industry of people...
John: Who are there to make you look like you imagine you were going to look on your wedding day.
John: But there's very little you can do about how you imagined you were going to feel on your wedding day.
John: Oh, man, that's good.
John: And so that is, you know, a lot of people go into their wedding with that already, you know, already disappointed that they don't feel like they thought they should feel.
John: And that's true of so much of what we do.
John: And the hardest thing in the world is to basically be here now.
John: Be like, right, I am neither the guy that throws the punch nor the guy who is punched.
John: I am this guy who has been punched and doesn't want it.
John: And not Bukowski.
John: And I mean, I still... The problem with me, I've been sober for 20 years.
John: And...
John: The reason that anyone who's been sober 20 years would go to an AA meeting is that it still is a present problem.
John: I wake up every day and I still go, well, I don't want to be the guy that gets punched.
John: I want to be the guy that throws the punch.
John: And it's like, you know what, guy?
John: What you should be is a guy sitting, I guess, right now listening to somebody who's 60 days sober saying that same thing.
John: And that will help you a little bit.
John: It's a version of life, it's a way of looking at life that is really unflinching.
John: But it's the closest to reality, it's the closest philosophy of reality I've ever seen.
John: And that doesn't appeal to a lot of people.
John: Myself included!
John: Myself included!
John: But there it is.
John: You want reality?
John: I am reality.
Merlin: Put your dollar in the basket, asshole.
Merlin: Oh, John, that was good.
John: Swoosh.