Ep. 160: "Gidgets and Gasmos"
Merlin: this episode of roderick on the line is sponsored by cards against humanity they asked us not to read an ad so hey just enjoy the show hello hey john hi merlin how's it going good how are you going great that was a really really fast restart you must have some very recent equipment there
John: Yeah, well, I was restarting my computer, and so I had to go get some gerbil chow from the grocery store across the street that stocks gerbil chow to feed all the gerbils inside my now –
John: completely archaic computer device, which still looks very modern.
John: That's what's deceptive about it, right?
John: The design was so ahead of its time that it still, to me at least, looks very, very modern.
Merlin: I have two beloved Apple devices at my house right now that won't turn on at all.
Merlin: And they look like something from Star Trek.
Merlin: They're so modern.
John: Oh, they're very modern.
John: My extremely modern phone has been engaging me in conversation recently about how my iCloud is almost full.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: My wife wakes up to that literally every morning.
John: And it's interesting when I think about it because, of course, I mean, how can a cloud be full?
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: You know what I mean?
John: When I think about it, a cloud can't be full.
John: I mean, it rains when it gets full.
John: A cloud rains.
John: But clouds can get very, very big before you would describe them as full.
John: They can retain a lot of matter.
John: But my phone insists that it's time for me to either upgrade to a plan.
John: A bigger cloud.
John: Basically, it's saying attach some additional eels to your neck.
John: Or the alternative is go to apple slash menu dot details slash Bitcoin slash eels.
John: And they'll walk you through a very easy process where you can manage your content.
John: in the sense that each app and deliverable has a content management capability which enables you to not know at all anything about how much space things are using or how that is part of how their operating system adjudicates
John: What they do is they show you some bars, some colored bars that indicate how full your cloud is.
John: The biggest one of those bars is something you can do nothing about, nor can you understand it.
John: And then the other bars are similarly opaque.
John: The bar called Other.
John: Other, right.
John: But what's wonderful is that they say like, oh, if you'd like to manage your content, which is what I would actually prefer to do, I would prefer to manage my content.
John: I would prefer to manage what is on the phone.
John: and not have the phone full of secret contracts, not have it full of end-user agreements that give away all of my information to Chelsea Manning.
John: I would prefer to just be able to go in there and see very clearly what's there and call the things I do not want.
John: And they present it as though that is not only a possibility, but it's just a simple process.
John: You just follow the little arrow...
John: From Apple care down to Apple don't care.
John: Snap.
John: And yet I would need a computer maths degree from a community college.
John: I think technically it's a certificate.
John: A certificate.
John: I would need a certification that you can get on nights and weekends while working at
John: Your overnight shift at Denny's.
John: And then I would also need, and this is the key.
John: This is the thing that they don't tell you.
John: I would need one year of free time that I had nothing better to do than to sit and figure out how to freaking delete what I can delete.
John: So in summary, it just works.
John: And what's amazing is it looks very, very modern.
John: It's a very modern message my wife wakes up to every day.
John: Your cloud is full.
John: Your cloud is full.
John: It's so satisfying because it's so just the fonts were chosen.
John: The chamfered edges and the hand weight of it, the hand feel.
John: Yeah, it snaps to a grid and it – Yeah, that's true.
John: Yeah.
John: But in any case, so I'm very excited.
John: And what's funny is that you just – you feel – you and I have – you and I resist resignation all the time, right?
John: I do not like to make decisions from a place of resignation.
John: I know that you don't either.
Merlin: I'd prefer not to.
Merlin: I'd like to understand what I'm resigning to and why.
Merlin: Right.
John: And this entire eel-based economy is an economy predicated on resignation.
John: We give them the appearance of a choice where one of the choices is non-functioning.
John: And the other choice, we just keep saying, like, it's so simple.
John: All you have to do is just upgrade.
John: Just start paying in on a monthly basis.
John: Or, of course, there's this very simple other direction you could go, which is a trap street at every turn.
John: Like, dead end, dead end, dead end.
John: And it all just redirects you back.
John: It's like that scene in Animal House.
John: Hey, welcome to the frat party.
John: You know, have you met Muhammad and Ahmed?
John: And so...
John: And so you get back to this thing and eventually your phone stops working, your computer stops working, and you resignedly pay for the thing.
John: You just pay for the hope that a bigger cloud will get you back in the game.
Mm-hmm.
John: And I just cannot, I just, I see that eel and it's, you know, it's funny, like eels are unpleasant looking, but this eel has a kind of like cheeky smile.
John: He just wants to attach himself.
John: This remora wants to attach himself to my neck vein.
Merlin: For some reason, it reminds me a little bit of, I don't know what the best example of this is, but it's like how they put ATMs in casinos, you know, where you can go and you can, they're like special ATMs.
Merlin: Because in addition to being very costly ATMs, you can get like cash advances and stuff like that.
Merlin: And when you're in the headiness of gambling, it's not like you're making a note of every $100 or $200 or $500 that you're taking out.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: You're not really keeping track of that, but it feels sustaining to be able to keep gambling.
Merlin: I'm not much of a gambler, but I've seen it.
Merlin: And that's the thing here with the eels that you're describing is that a solution is presented in the form of an eel.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Just agree to attach this to somewhere, anywhere, anywhere that's convenient for you where it can get blood, and we're pretty sure everything will be fine.
Merlin: And you go, well, you know what?
Merlin: I have a lot less blood now.
Merlin: I'm carrying an eel, and it's still not working.
Merlin: They go, oh, it's no problem at all.
Merlin: We'll just give you another eel.
John: Here's another eel.
John: The thing is these eels are small.
Merlin: See, the listener is imagining an eel like a fantastical eel, like something like a Grimm Brothers eel.
Merlin: No, they're more like nightcrawlers, just little guys.
John: They're little eels, and they're like – I hesitate to call them leeches because leeches have – That's such an ugly word.
John: It's really pejorative.
John: It's from a different time.
John: Term, that's right.
John: And I think they are more properly remora.
John: But yeah, my resistance to it is not to any one particular eel.
John: It is to the idea of having eels on me.
Merlin: And if you put one... And even if you make them thinner and have the battery last longer, it's still an eel.
John: Even if that eel looks like something out of like 17 deleted minutes from 2001 A Space Odyssey, even if it is a Kubrickian eel...
John: I do not want it on me.
John: And I think this stems from a time when I was on outward bound and we, uh, we had been paddling our canoes for several weeks in the, in the, uh, boundary waters canoe area of Northern Minnesota and Southern, uh, Canada, Ontario, I think.
Um,
John: And we hated each other, everyone on that trip.
John: I was put into a group of much bigger boys, older boys, who were all sent there by their various juvenile detention facilities in their respective towns.
Merlin: Outward Bound can be a form of cutting trail, right?
Merlin: It can be a place for some people to get straightened out.
John: Yeah.
John: And there were there were lots of people like there were lots of groups in my when I arrived at Outward Bound, you know, there are hundreds of kids there and they all are separated into different kind of different squads.
John: And there were squads that were co-ed where they were, we would sometimes encounter them, you know, when you're out in the boundary waters area, there are some choke points kind of where one lake feeds into another.
John: And even if you're out there for three weeks, like you're going to run into some other people just because, you know, these waterfalls or whatever.
Yeah.
John: And we would encounter these other groups and they would canoe by us singing.
John: They were singing their song or whatever.
John: Boys and girls out camping and learning skills.
John: Yeah, that sounds like summer camp.
John: Yeah, and my group...
John: were all – they were like – we were 12 of us maybe, 10 total bullies and felons, kids with like knives in their boots.
John: And then me – and they put me in that group because I was big-sized and also because I think I was sent – my folks sent me there to straighten me out.
John: But I was not like –
John: compared to the kid from Baltimore,
John: like the degree to which I was on the wrong path in life was not anywhere close to the, you know, I was not living in a world where I was smoking cigarettes, throwing knives, and holding other kids' heads under the water, right?
John: I was just, I was just sulking.
John: And sulking, at least in my culture, was like as bad as being a violent person
John: teen perpetrator so it was more like you were you were a pain in the ass on the wrong path rather than actively dangerous yeah I was a pain in the ass and so they sent me to this and I don't know what box they checked where they were like you know send him send him with the group that that is like basically penal and
John: But I was in the airport in Duluth, Minnesota, and a kid that ended up being in my squad sat down next to me, and he was there with a corrections officer who was escorting him to Outward Bound.
John: And I was like – I read too many Archie comics or something.
John: That was my crime.
John: But anyway, so several weeks in or however many weeks in, right at the point where we were living on brown sugar and butter because all the other kids had – all the bigger kids had stolen all the food.
John: We arrived at a little tiny – we were canoeing through this slow-moving river and the river –
John: uh had had a drop like a like a 10-foot waterfall and we we saw it in time and we kind of pulled our canoes over to the side and portaged them around and then and it was incredibly hot and humid and here was this beautiful little waterfall kind of undiscovered waterfall out in the middle of canada and we took off our clothes and jumped in and it was like one of those
John: few moments on this whole long trip where there was any feeling of camaraderie.
John: No one was trying to kill anyone else.
John: It was like everybody was so happy to have found this little place and you could duck under the waterfall and pop up and breathe and there was a little bubble there and it was just like a perfect moment.
John: One of the like three times on that whole trip where I didn't fear for my life and then the first kid gets out
John: of the pond and the rest of us who are in the water can see that he is covered with leeches, leeches that are the size of Coke bottles.
Merlin: Oh God.
John: And he doesn't see it because he's just climbing out and like, and we're all like, Oh, you know, like, Oh no.
John: And then also, Oh shit there.
John: Those leeches are all over us too.
John: And so we, you know, we all climbed out of there and had to,
John: had to, in that state of complete panic, figure out how to get the leeches off.
John: Somebody had to go find a lighter and go through this whole terrible process.
John: They were inside of our shorts.
John: And so I have this leech, this terrible leech memory, where every time my phone offers me an opportunity to make my cloud bigger,
John: I feel like there are leeches in my shorts.
John: And I can't... You get triggered.
John: I can never... That's exactly right.
John: I can never shake that feeling.
John: And then all of a sudden, I'm right back sleeping in a tent with a kid that's trying to kill me.
John: And it's... I mean, I wouldn't call it PTSD, but it is a... I do have some strong feelings.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: That's a hell of a story.
Merlin: That's a horrible... While you were talking, I was just wondering, it seems like in order for Outward Bound to work, it has to be hard, or it has to be difficult on some level.
Merlin: Maybe not in the way that you're describing, but I'm just wondering how often people just get injured or die doing it.
Merlin: It just seems like there must be horrible injuries, whether or not it's from a felon with a knife in his boot.
Merlin: It seems like people must just die doing Outward Bound.
John: It can be very hard, but I think what ends up happening is you get really qualified
John: guides and counselors and
John: but there's a lot of variation there.
John: Right.
John: And so, so in our case, our two guides were when you, at first, at first blush, you think like, you know, wow, we, we got the, we got the, um, we lucked out here because my, our guide had hair down in the middle of his back, a long beard.
John: And his co-guide was a, a woman that was like really strong and, and, um,
John: and had actually had a flat top haircut.
John: And this is 1983.
John: I mean, it was, it was, it was really hard.
John: They were really hardcore outdoor superstars who could live off of moss and, you know, had, had basically lived out, out of doors for a long, long time and were very, very capable.
John: But what they were not was youth artists.
John: guidance counselors or violence counselors.
John: And so their attitudes about all of the interpersonal shit going on between the kids was just like, I mean, they had no way to
John: really, they did not counsel us and they had no way to impose discipline.
John: So they would say, all right, everybody, you know, here we are, like unpack your tents and set them up and let's get a fire going and start cooking dinner.
John: And like four kids would be like, no, fuck you.
John: You can't like, you know, send them to detention.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, we're already out.
John: You can't exclude them from the group at that point.
John: You can't refuse to feed them.
John: And so, and the thing is that at a certain point we got far enough out that none of these kids could escape just because if they left the group, they would die in the wilderness.
John: So we were, we were, we were bound together, but that, that tipping point where, that I think that outward bound works toward where you feel that, where that, that,
John: that that um that binding starts to feel like uh family or something like you are you're really depending on one another and that that inner dependence becomes a thing that you treasure and and that just never took root it was weeks and weeks of
John: like these kids just petulant and stealing and refusing and fighting.
John: And I was such a nerd that I really wanted to have the transformative experience, right?
John: I'd read the literature.
John: I was like, I'm going to come out of this.
John: This is going to be the thing that makes me a man.
John: Even as I was saying like, oh, I hate my parents and being forced to do this.
John: there was that other side of me that was like, I'm ready to embrace the transformative experience.
John: I'm ready to survive, be a survivalist.
John: And, you know, at every turn I was just sort of pushed because I was younger than they were.
John: I was big, but I was two years younger than every other kid.
John: And they just pushed my face in the dirt and just, you know, take my food out of my hand.
John: And to dare me to do something about it.
Merlin: How long were you out there?
John: Weeks and weeks.
John: Really?
John: It was an intensive program.
John: And I think the guidance counselors were – or counselors.
John: I mean our guides were trying to – they were operating on the assumption that this couldn't last forever.
John: Eventually this Lord of the Flies stuff would –
John: would mutate into brotherly love, but it never did.
John: And I don't know if we were still out there together 20, 30 years later, whether there would have ever have been, you know, I think, I think that was a classic group of kids that, uh,
John: left to their own devices would have starved to death and died of exposure rather than ever band together to do something.
John: They would have willingly and willfully done it.
Merlin: That's what makes me think that the kind of guides that they have, obviously they have to have the experience with a variety of challenges involving being outdoors for a long time, outdoorsy people.
Merlin: But it really seems like –
Merlin: irresponsible to have people who aren't able to almost like a drill team, a drill, drill sergeant type, but like somebody who really knows how to get inside of the head.
Merlin: I mean, just, just because it really, it only, it only takes one person going off the, off the rails out there to, to really endanger a lot of people.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It seems like not intervening.
Merlin: I mean, it sounds like that wasn't a strategy.
Merlin: It was just like, that's what they were capable of.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And, and that was the, that was the thing when I, when I, when we saw that other,
John: group of kids sort of paddle past us at an intersection of two lakes, you know, and they were headed this way and we were headed that way.
John: And they were singing
John: Up until that point, I felt like through those weeks that this was the experience that everyone was having.
John: And so this must be what Outward Bound is and this must be what – they must do this on purpose.
John: And you come out the other side and it's like you went to – it's like you went to like a really – You're at Camp North Star and then like all the rich kids are over there.
John: Yeah, right, right.
John: I mean I felt like –
John: And it's like going to jail, except there are also mosquito bites.
Merlin: They should use it.
Merlin: They should put that right on the brochure.
John: But then these other kids were having so much fun, I realized that this wasn't the experience of everybody that was doing this.
John: It was just what was happening to us.
John: And that was the thing that made me... That was maybe my first experience with that feeling of like, I still have...
John: 11 more days that I have to survive and I don't I cannot look 11 days into the future because I will I'll panic and and I'll be paralyzed I have to just
John: do what I'm doing right now, get to the end of today, make it asleep, and then tomorrow is a new day.
John: But that sense of like, I mean, when you're 13, 11 days might as well be a million days.
John: And when I was walking across Europe, obviously I had a much bigger experience
John: problem of like i still have three and a half months of this to do and uh so i just have to keep my you know keep my head down and put one foot in front of the other
Merlin: It makes that walk, and so many of your other self-imposed survival games seem... I had not heard your Outward Bound story, so I look at those things in a new way now.
Merlin: Because you knew what it was like to be out there feeling desperate, and yet you put yourself in that situation many times after that.
John: Yeah, and I wonder whether or not...
John: That outward bound thing kind of cast the die a little bit.
John: And if I'd gone to that and it had a merry old time, whether I'd have a different relationship to...
John: the sort of the survivalist, um, adventures that I play, you know, I don't, I honestly don't know.
John: And the thing is like, you know, I've, I mean, I mean people who've been to outward bound, no one, it's not like we sit and, and, uh, and have encounter sessions about our experience, but I think a lot of people have wonderful experiences at outward bound.
John: And, um, um,
John: And so, and you know, obviously that was, that was decades ago when I went.
John: So, and I, and I still am glad that I experienced it, but it was, you know, it was an example of, of like what happens when you put your kid, what you try to, you try to modify your kid by
John: putting them through a very grueling experience rather than modify your kid rather than a not trying to modify your kid or be modify your kid by putting them in a uh like a try and find a place where they can bloom
Merlin: Well, that's actually what I'm really thinking about right now is that, you know, even as young as our kids are, I feel like we can probably both – again, I'll speak for myself.
Merlin: I can really see how, you know, what matters is the accumulation of what happened every day.
Merlin: What happened yesterday?
Merlin: What happened yesterday?
Merlin: What happened – it's not so different from like –
Merlin: The difference between like, when did somebody get addicted to cigarettes?
Merlin: Was it the first time they heard about cigarettes?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Was it the first cigarette they had?
Merlin: Probably not.
Merlin: Maybe with crack, but not so much with smoking.
Merlin: Was it after the first pack?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: It was sometime between the first pack and the day they died, they got addicted.
Merlin: And it's very difficult to pick out one day.
Merlin: But you can, you know, at some point you can definitely say it's going to be harder than not at this point to stop smoking.
Merlin: Just as one example.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And, you know, would sending somebody out on Outward Bound make that go away?
Merlin: Possibly.
Merlin: It's just that we are the accumulation of so many little micro experiences, micro decisions, you know, little tiny things.
Merlin: And it's – I guess the reason I mention it here is I wonder –
Merlin: you know, it's kind of amazing that anything ever works for something like that.
Merlin: Because you take somebody who's like, could not be any way other than how they are in some ways, good or bad.
Merlin: I mean, it's nice to think like, oh, yeah, you know, I raised a good kid, or this is a good person, or, you know, this is the straight A kid or whatever.
Merlin: But the thing is, you are whatever you are, and you so are whatever you are.
Merlin: And it's amazing to think that any kind of cold water therapy like that
Merlin: works out at all, unless it's really tuned to like, for example, you know, I guess I can think of some kind of like, I don't know, feel good TV show idea of like a kid who's actually very independent, some kind of Captain Kirk character who's having trouble fitting in in school and discovers they have leadership skills once they're put to a challenge.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, how do you know what's going to be right for somebody?
Merlin: How do you know whether that's just going to make them horribly bitter and covered with leeches?
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and
John: I think that Outward Bound did talk a lot about leadership, but I was 13 in a group of 15-year-olds and I was never going to be accepted as a leader by them.
John: And when I would say like, hey, everybody, can't we just stop fighting for a minute and try and get this fire built?
John: What that would do is it would turn their attention back to me
John: For just long enough for everybody to agree that the thing to do right now is to throw rocks at John.
John: Like whatever their other fighting was, you know, if I stuck my hand.
John: They were willing to set that aside and just focus on you.
John: Yeah, they would all band together to destroy somebody if that person stuck their head up.
John: Like there was a Jewish kid from Salt Lake City.
John: And like the first hour of the first day, the other kids agreed that his name was Bagel.
John: But he was also from Salt Lake.
John: So that confused them a lot.
John: But like, you know, imagine...
John: imagine being called bagel for a month.
John: Um, and he was, you know, he was sent there for some kind of juvenile reformation too, but he, um, he wasn't violent, but the thing was he knew that he couldn't really ally himself with me either because if he allied himself with me, like I was the, I was the weakest.
John: So he needed to, when, when the time came, uh,
John: they were dumping on me he needed to join in that too yeah I mean it sounds like basic 7th grade kind of stuff yeah right because all he was hoping was that they wouldn't turn their attention on him so I mean and I look at it when I spend a lot of time now looking at the criminal justice system and this cold water therapy thing where you bust some kid for selling pot
John: And instead of slapping his hand and sending him home to his mother, because he's a black kid, you put him in jail or you put him in juvenile detention.
John: And then he gets out and his next crime is just that he didn't show up for his meeting.
John: Right, right, right.
John: And so then – That's a different kind of leech.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like people have to pay all those fines and all of those fees for things.
Merlin: Those are just leeches, leeches, leeches.
John: Leeches.
John: That's right.
John: And so then he gets a fine because he didn't show up for his meeting and then he doesn't pay the fine and then it's – then that's a serious –
John: problem because now he's defaulting and so that's another charge and pretty soon you get somebody who never did anything you know their initial crime was just i mean when i think about the number of people in the united states right now who are in jail for pot yeah and we are
John: on the verge of legalizing pot nationwide.
John: It's certainly legal here.
John: There are people standing in front of the jail smoking legal pot
John: while people inside the jail who were sent to jail for pot, look out the windows at them and, you know, and like went to jail for pot.
John: And then when they got out, failed to report to their parole officer and went to jail for a parole violation.
John: And, you know, and they end up in jail and jail and jail and jail.
John: And then they get out of jail and they can't find a job because they have a jail record and all for nothing.
John: And it's, and, and it's,
John: And it's based on this idea that sending somebody to jail that first time is going to straighten them up.
John: And it's such a faulty notion that's based in that strange Calvinism that's buried 100 feet deep in the American psyche.
Merlin: Largely unexamined.
Merlin: Completely, yeah.
Merlin: But we can all agree on cheese, right?
Merlin: I think we can all agree that this person has some kind of ill humors that need to be worked out of them.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Yeah, we need to dunk them in the pond.
Merlin: It's virtually medieval.
Yeah.
Merlin: But anytime somebody tries to solve any of these problems, once you – like, hearing you say this, I'm already sick to my stomach.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When you talk about this, like, it's so gross.
Merlin: There's a thing somewhere on public radio the other day about – you know, everybody – for years now, everybody's always said, homelessness, oh, this is an easy problem.
Merlin: You just got to build shelters.
Merlin: It's like, you ever been in a homeless shelter?
Merlin: Like, it's not a great place to be.
Merlin: Oh, you just got to do this.
Merlin: You just got to do that.
Merlin: Somebody comes along and tries to come up with something really novel.
Merlin: Like, you were talking about the thing a while back about, like, actually setting people up and giving them a house and a place to live.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that actually helps the homeless problem because now they're not homeless anymore.
Merlin: You're like, wait a minute, that's cheating.
Merlin: You can't actually help them.
Merlin: But this piece was about just – it's so fascinating and, as I say, so stomach-churning.
Merlin: We get into the implementation details of trying to fix this because –
Merlin: So people hear me joking about how much poop there is on the streets here.
Merlin: And you said this in that article, that interview with you.
Merlin: It's like nobody poops on the street because they want to.
Merlin: They do it because there's nowhere else to go.
Merlin: And it's not these people are they may have mental health issues, but they're not crazy.
Merlin: I'll give you that.
Merlin: And so in this case, they're talking about how do you deal with like this is one of the single biggest problems that people who are homeless or on the edge have is like what to do with their stuff when they're doing something else.
Merlin: So if you want to try and get a job, where do you get clothes?
Merlin: Where do you get a shower?
Merlin: And how do you have your five shopping carts be looked after while you're trying to get a job?
Merlin: It's virtually impossible.
Merlin: And people don't really think about that implementation detail.
Merlin: It's so mundane and so extremely sad that you don't kind of want to think about it too much.
Merlin: But that's daily life.
Merlin: Daily life for them is, this is everything that I have in the entire world.
Merlin: And it looks like junk to you, but this is what I have.
Merlin: And how
Merlin: What are the steps between here and now I'm providing for myself in this studio apartment?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So many steps.
John: Well, and you just think about the number of times that I have prioritized straightening out my file of envelopes.
John: Right, like I have an enormous closet.
John: It's not an enormous closet, but it is a closet that is full of stationery.
Merlin: Yeah, if you find some good vintage envelopes or good vintage stationery, you've got to put it somewhere.
Merlin: Vintage envelopes.
Merlin: Listeners think I'm kidding.
Merlin: I am not kidding.
Merlin: Colored typing paper.
Merlin: Really nice folders back when they used to make good folders.
John: Beautiful folders.
John: Heavy, heavy bonds.
John: Cardstock, yeah.
John: And then all of the sort of like vintage postcards and stuff, all unused and I'm stockpiling it in the hope that I will one day return to mailed correspondence.
John: that I will one day sit down with my cursive typewriter.
John: You're an epistolary survivalist.
John: And write heartfelt letters on scented stationery that is from 19th century France and mail these things.
John: But I have all this stuff.
John: And what's funny is that the time, it's not like I have recently spent any time organizing it, but I have spent time with this material.
John: It gives me great pleasure.
John: But I have prioritized that over other things.
John: Like I need to go straighten out my stationary right now instead of work on my book or my new album or get some exercise.
John: And so I'm very aware of a major problem, I think, that we never really think about, which is that
John: One of the primary problems that people with mental health issues have is prioritization of
John: And I'm incredibly sympathetic to the idea or to just the knowledge that so often you say, listen, you need to secure these necessities before you worry about your five shopping carts full of Taco Bell cups.
John: And the person is like, I am resisting what you're saying.
John: You have no idea how important these shopping carts full of Taco Bell cups are.
John: And that...
John: I mean, that little switch is something that I experience all the time personally, but I'm on the other side of a fence.
John: But I could see myself very easily suffering a series of defeats and just not being able to just practice a kind of...
John: understanding of like the next step i mean the next step is so is for some people always so clear and for me is always so um covered with vines right the next step it's just it's just a ball of vines but the the you know more importantly like i at our core in our culture in particular um
John: you can always, as you start trying to treat homelessness or you start trying to address the criminal justice system or any one of these, you start dealing with income inequality, you always push down, push down, and you get to a certain level, a certain tipping point with almost anybody you talk to where you arrive at the moment where they feel like, wait a minute now, that's not fair.
John: Like that person has not done anything to deserve
John: food and shelter.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like Kobayashi Maru.
Merlin: The way this game works is not in the way that it seems.
Merlin: And if you actually do the steps that are needed to win this game, you will by definition be cheating.
John: Cheating, right.
John: Because there is someone over here who is working hard
John: And they are barely making it.
John: Because it's a meritocracy.
John: That's right.
John: So this person's working hard and they're barely making it.
John: You look at that and you go, right, that is not, I mean, that is unfair, but that person is really working hard.
John: And then you talk about providing an apartment for a homeless person and three squares a day.
John: Which is what this other person who's working hard is barely achieving for themselves.
John: And you just go, well, you can't just give that away to somebody.
John: That wouldn't be fair.
John: And that's the point at which you say, well, then that person goes and lives in the bushes because that's what they deserve.
John: And addressing that cognitive struggle in our culture is like so hard because no one's really aware where it's coming from, where that lesson originates.
John: That if you don't work, if you don't try, then ultimately you deserve to die.
John: You deserve to be pushed out of the village and wander the desert.
John: And...
John: And the standard for even being able to stay in the game at the lowest level now is so much higher than it's ever been.
John: God, yes.
John: You can't live in the city unless you are really...
John: Really working hard.
Merlin: John, we had our every couple of months comic meetup and a really, really nice guy and his girlfriend came.
Merlin: They're just getting ready to move here from Atlanta.
Merlin: And it's so funny.
Merlin: I feel like I have this conversation with people so often where I want all the words that come out of my mouth to be welcome.
Merlin: I really hope you enjoy it here.
Merlin: And in my head, I'm forming those words.
Merlin: And I want those to be the words that come out.
Merlin: But instead, all that comes out is like a series of sighs.
Merlin: And like, I was like, oh, I hope you like the comments.
Merlin: It's the worst.
Merlin: Do not.
Merlin: It's terrible.
Merlin: Don't come here.
Merlin: It's bad.
Merlin: It's really bad.
Merlin: If you don't think it's bad, you're the problem.
Merlin: If you don't think this town is, it's like living inside of a Godspeed, you black emperor song.
Merlin: Like it is disintegrating around us.
Merlin: And if you don't see that, like it's totally snowpiercer.
Merlin: Like you are in a much, you are in a different part of the motherfucking train.
Merlin: If you do not see the shit storm that everybody in this town is living through.
Merlin: And I want that to come out as congratulations on the move.
Merlin: I hope the job works out for you.
Merlin: But instead, that's how it comes up because, you know, it's so strange to me.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to be that guy, but here's the thing.
Merlin: Like Twitter has this really nice building in a part of town that is now kind of like wants to kind of fancy up because it's where Twitter is and stuff.
Merlin: But it's so strange that, you know, you've been to, like, Toulon.
Merlin: You know that area, like, around 6th and Market, like, you know, between kind of the Civic Center, like, you know, west of Civic Center.
Merlin: But it's pretty bad.
Merlin: It's pretty gross.
Merlin: And it's just so strange to me that some of the folks who are the most fortunate, like, are walking straight past some of the grittiest stuff.
Merlin: I don't have to go there very often.
Merlin: I had to be there a couple weeks ago for something, for an event.
Merlin: And I was shocked.
Merlin: Like, walking out of the Civic Center, BART, and walking up, it was like... This is like something from a science fiction dystopia.
Merlin: It's so gross and so desperate.
Merlin: And anyway, welcome, my friend from Atlanta.
Merlin: I hope this job... You know?
John: I mean, in every dystopian movie...
John: there is clear separation between the haves and the have-nots.
John: There's always a metaphorical wall.
John: There's always a train that you have to make it through several armored doors to get to the front.
John: Left to right, back to front.
John: What's amazing about San Francisco...
John: and seattle is that there's no i mean there are walls obviously like people retreat behind walls but in the in the main complex of the city the walls are all in people's minds you know you come down in in your in your skinny uh pants and you go across the street to get a
John: A $11 coffee beverage that was pooped out of a monkey's butt.
John: And you make it back across the street and back into the lobby and you just did not see the economic carnage that you had to literally step over to get the monkey poop coffee.
John: So, I mean, I...
John: I sympathize with the young rich people who are embracing a radical ideology.
John: There are a lot of millennial kids with a lot of opportunity who are channeling that frustration into ideologies.
John: They are not the most self-reflective people either.
John: but it really does feel like something's got to happen, and I don't want it to be... Something's going to happen.
John: I don't want it to be a violent revolution.
John: That doesn't interest me, and I don't think that's a very good solution.
John: I think historically, just in the last 200 years, we can look back at all the violent revolutions, and it's not too hard to say...
John: uh, that Martin Luther King and Gandhi had, and Mother Teresa had much better long-term results from the way that, from their practice than the, uh, the revolutions of 1917 or 1848 or, um, even 1968.
John: Uh,
John: So I want everybody to hear and see and get engaged and start making a difference.
John: But boy, speaking as somebody who is trying to do that, it is not easy.
Merlin: Because like you say, those walls are there even if they're not there.
Merlin: We can mentally make those walls.
Merlin: It's just, you know, it's so weird.
Merlin: Maybe one for me personally, maybe one barometer of how good I feel about the culture is how much I'm constantly reminded of the movie Brazil.
Merlin: And I'm thinking a lot about Brazil lately.
Merlin: And in this case now, I'm thinking of the wonderful scene, wonderful, horrible scene where they're at the restaurant, say the number, when they're in the restaurant and a bomb goes off and people are bleeding and dying.
Merlin: And so, of course, then all the waiters rush around to bring up like folding screens so people don't have to see the victims while they're still eating.
John: The other thing is – Bob Hoskins keeps coming to me in a dream.
John: Oh my god.
John: He's so great.
John: He's so great.
John: I referenced Brazil to somebody the other day in a political conversation and I was just greeted by blank stares.
John: Have we really – are we so far?
John: Oh my god.
John: Brazil was the language.
Merlin: A movie is so relevant today that it's kind of appalling that it was that relevant in 1986 or whenever it was.
Merlin: It seems impossible that that movie just seems to make more sense all the time.
Merlin: Not just the bureaucracy, but just the ineffectiveness.
Merlin: The ineffectiveness and the callowness and ugh.
Merlin: You said Martin Luther King and I wrote something down.
Merlin: Last week was kind of a big week for America.
Merlin: And one of the quotes people kept tossing out, a great quote from Martin Luther King, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
John: Yeah, and I use that quote a lot.
John: And the response over the last several years from people on the left has been, really?
John: Do you really think that's true?
John: There's been so much cynicism.
John: Right.
Merlin: Because you have a very optimistic approach to this, of saying that in the case of Seattle, just for folks who don't know, you said over and over, we're on the brink of something really amazing happening in Seattle, and why can't everyone see that?
Merlin: Things are getting better.
Merlin: We have a liberal utopia in some ways.
Merlin: Now we have to get the implementation details right.
John: Right.
John: And ultimately, I'm a historian or I have a historian's view of things.
John: And so if you look at that arc in historical contexts, really in any one you want to choose...
John: It's absolutely true.
John: It bends toward justice.
John: And so that cynicism is just from people that can only see five years on either side or that don't think that way at all and are only responding to how they're feeling right now or to what's politically expedient to say.
John: But yes, of course we are making progress.
John: Everything we've ever done as human beings has been
John: a progression towards something that we never talk about or try to define.
John: And there are a lot of people who believe that that progression is a kingdom after death or that that progression is
John: To personally ascend or to climb through reincarnation, a ladder of enlightenment.
John: There are all these ideas about what happens to you.
John: But we never talk about what we're doing, what happens to us and what we've been through as a species and the progression we've made.
John: And I mean, we see the destruction we have wrought and we can look at ourselves as a kind of
John: Vermin or plague on the earth that has gradually sort of, you know, just as just as any kind of parasite.
John: you know, at first you don't notice it and then pretty soon there's some discoloration on your arm and then pretty soon it's, you know, you can really see the destruction and your hair falls out.
John: You know, that's kind of, if you did a time lapse of the earth over the last 50,000 years, like human beings have been here a long time and you wouldn't have noticed them.
John: But just recently we've reached the level of like parasitic
John: overpopulation where the where we're starting to kill the host but at the same time we have like done so such incredible things and have built such an incredible hive and have conceived of such incredible notions you know we invented the idea of zero
John: as far as we know, right?
John: There's no zero in nature.
John: We invented it and that's impressive work.
John: And so, but we never stop and say like,
John: leaving aside Valhalla and, um, and heaven where you're reunited with your ancestors, like what is our longterm goal?
John: How do we think about our goal for humanity that, that will, that is generations long?
John: other than just build, build, build?
John: Right, right.
John: What's our long-term plan now?
John: And we're finally at a place where we can talk about this because prior to this in human history, it's just like for millennia, it was just... It was more like season to season, like how do we stay alive?
John: Yeah, how do we stay alive?
John: How do we beat back nature?
Right.
John: and and persist and then you know certain certain places it kind of morphed into like okay we don't need to you know my family at least says rich guy in 900 ad like my family's going to survive now now how do i consolidate power and money to myself so that i can protect my tribe or you know i mean all these evolutions of
John: But we're only now – and this is one of these ideas about like the nascent power of the internet.
John: Only now are we able to see through the broad sweep of time that we have the ability to start making plans for ourselves and our cities and where we're talking – this whole sustainability movement is a long-term game.
Merlin: There's no way we can even know what that will look like if it's succeeding.
John: Yeah, right, right.
John: You'll never know.
John: But you have to make sacrifices and play a role in an ultimate goal that you're just one of millions of participants in.
John: And, yeah, that's very exciting and it could be very – it could be really uniting.
Merlin: Well, yeah, that's why I – actually why I brought up that quote and I'm glad you said what you said because it actually underscores what I was thinking.
Merlin: I mean first of all, like when you talk about stuff like what we thought the internet would do for us, you know, the internet has ended up being something that we mainly use to amplify what we think.
Merlin: or amplify what we want to have heard about ourselves and about the things that we care about.
Merlin: But in talking about how the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, when we were talking earlier about how you deal with stuff like homelessness or these crime problems, I think the attractor, the magnet that helps pull that arc in a lot of ways, if you look back in retrospect at what has succeeded at so much of those times along the way, is when we...
Merlin: to the extent possible, kept reducing our sense of who is the other.
Merlin: If you look at anything that has ever gotten better about people, it's about realizing there really isn't any such thing as an other.
Merlin: I mean, we needed that other when it was about tribes, right?
Merlin: If it was 900 AD and you wanted to keep your castle going, everybody was an other except for this group.
Merlin: It's just that, you know, you look at what's happened in the past week.
Merlin: Think about where we were two years ago, let alone 10 years ago, with thinking about who's allowed to love each other publicly.
Merlin: I think a big amount of that, I'm far from the first person to point this out, but it helps a lot when you start realizing, first of all, there's a lot more of that kind of people than I thought.
Merlin: Isn't that interesting?
Merlin: It's not really, you know, one in 10 or less.
Merlin: It could be a lot more than that, and it could be a lot more complicated than that.
Merlin: But then you also start to realize they're not monsters.
Merlin: Maybe they deserve to be human beings.
Merlin: in a way that I didn't expect just by having, just by virtue of the fact that I've now been exposed to those people.
Merlin: And I see that they are just people and I'm the monster.
Merlin: That, I think a lot of that has happened in the last two years.
Merlin: Again, I'll speak for myself in some ways.
Merlin: There's all kinds of stuff where I'm going, like, I'm the real monster here.
Merlin: Like, all these other people that I think are impinging on the thing that I'd like to announce are not the problem.
Merlin: The problem is I'm not paying enough attention to who I think is the other and, like, what kind of case they have.
Merlin: How sad it is that they have to even make a case.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
John: Yeah, I agree that there is no other.
John: And ultimately, I mean, I remember when I was in high school, I had a couple of good friends who were really conservatives, you know, high school conservatives, right?
John: They loved Jack Kemp.
John: He was their hero.
Yeah.
John: And they were this kind of – they were the young Republicans who have a sort of sharp-dressed and sharp-edged ideology and that makes them feel very kind of superior and cool, particularly when they contrast themselves against the like soft liberalism.
John: Soft and wasteful liberalism.
John: And these guys were a couple of my really close friends.
John: We shared a taste in music and we shared a taste in comedy and we enjoyed each other's company, but we just could not...
John: And actually we enjoyed arguing about politics.
John: It was a thing that sort of bound us together in a way.
John: But the way that they had a quote that they would use to kind of try to defeat me in arguments when I would start talking too much about collective action or collective thinking.
John: And I think one of them had seen it on a bumper sticker one time and they would just throw it in my face.
John: they would uh you know i'd i'd be spinning this like story about how there there was no race uh it was just a construct and we needed to you know and this at 1986 or 1985 or whatever that wasn't as popularly known and these guys would sneer at me and go one planet one people please
John: which was a bumper sticker i guess like a liberal like a liberal like the kind of thing you'd buy at the co-op food store yeah one planet one people please and you know and i would kind of stand there and go like yeah actually right i mean one planet you can't dispute that one people pretty much
John: Pretty much one people if you think about it.
John: And the please part, I don't know what to tell you.
John: I don't know what to say.
John: Would you rather it be one planet, one people by force?
Merlin: But it's also getting to something that I happen to – I don't love feeling this way but agree on, which is that liberals can be insufferable.
Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Just the worst.
Merlin: It'll be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a big sale to buy a bomber.
Merlin: First of all, that's too fucking long to have on a bomber sticker.
Merlin: You need to edit that shit down.
Merlin: You can't read it.
John: It's too small.
John: One Planet, One People, Please got edited down to coexist.
Merlin: Oh, with all the little symbols?
Merlin: Yeah, the Bono.
Merlin: Oh my God, that is so perfect.
Merlin: That is such a perfect summary of what is annoying about liberals.
Merlin: That first of all, they're using all of these different symbols to form an English word.
Merlin: They're like, they're fucking with all of these very important symbols of different peoples and faiths to make an English language word.
Merlin: To make a font.
Merlin: To make a font, yeah, that they can put on their suburban or whatever.
Yeah.
John: I showed up at my office today, and my office manager, the manager of the building, slipped a key fob under the door for me.
John: The key fob being the new way that we're going to enter and exit the building.
Merlin: Oh, it's keyless entry?
John: Keyless entry.
John: Key fob.
John: Key fob.
John: And the key fob is built...
John: in such a way that there's really no way to carry it except on your key ring.
John: It is a key fob.
John: It's that you can't slip it in your wallet.
John: You can't.
John: It's small enough that it would get lost if you didn't put it somewhere.
John: And so I have to put it on my keys now.
John: But it's made out of that kind of putty colored plastic that all IBM PCs are made out of.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like that universal putty colored dingus plastic color.
Merlin: It's putty dingus.
John: Putty dingus.
John: Dingus putty.
John: Dingus putty.
John: And so I have this thing on my keys that now basically makes it look like my keys got lost, and this is the tag that they put on them in Lost and Found.
John: It looks like a piece of evidence now, or it looks like
John: I curate the look of my keys, right?
John: I'm not just some person with a bunch of dumb keys.
John: I have a little leather flap that's tooled, a little tooled leather flap
John: on my key ring that has a little kitten on it.
John: And then I arrange my keys in the order that I prefer to find them.
John: And one of the keys has a little piece of red tape on it and one of the keys is branded Seattle Seahawks.
John: And there are a couple of keys that are nice classic looking keys, like older keys, heavy style keys that I'm very proud of.
John: And then I have this fucking dingus putty thing on here.
John: And I know this is meant to make my life better.
John: I understand that it's part of the modernization project.
Merlin: Yeah, but it's so hegemonic.
Merlin: It's sort of like, you know, I have a feeling that for years now, you think about all those dumb loyalty programs, like, you know, you buy nine subs and you get a free sub, or you got to have what we used to call a check cashing card if you wanted to get the discount.
Merlin: At the grocery store.
Merlin: I imagine that in some way, the technology has existed for years to do what most of us do now, which is enter our phone number at the thing.
Merlin: You don't want to, but you want the discount, right?
Merlin: But I think the technology has probably existed for years.
Merlin: I think the real trick to having those loyalty cards is having a constant advertisement in your wallet for this place.
Merlin: That's what the loyalty card is.
Merlin: Because when you're doing your little taxonomy of keys and figuring out, in this case, what goes in your wallet, you have to decide which ones of those are important enough.
Merlin: But now, right next to your driver's license, your credit card, and a picture of your kid is a thing about subs.
Merlin: You carry around an advertisement about subs in your wallet all the time.
Merlin: which is brilliant.
Merlin: If you think about it, it's pretty brilliant that they pulled that off.
Merlin: I think that's what's happening with all these dingus, these dingai, the dingai putty is that they want, when you buy a fucking car now, they want you to carry this thing that's the size of a large matchbox.
Merlin: The car we got last year, I can't, I like, what do we really need to have a key this large?
Merlin: Because it doesn't want to be a key.
Merlin: It wants to be the nexus of keys.
Merlin: That's the hegemony.
Yeah.
Merlin: Why is college coming back to you this week?
Merlin: But that's what it wants to be.
Merlin: It doesn't want to be a king.
Merlin: It wants to be king of the keys.
Merlin: And then everybody else cleaves unto him.
Merlin: King key.
Merlin: King key.
Merlin: Whoa, betide you.
Merlin: How many dinguses do you have?
Merlin: How many ding guy?
Merlin: You want to know the truth?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I have the most basic, you know, the kind of key chain where you open up with your thumbnail and put the keys on there?
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Two keys.
John: Whoa, what?
John: House key, office key?
Merlin: House key, office key.
Merlin: I spent 48 years getting it down to two keys.
Merlin: I used to think it was a sign of status to have many keys.
Merlin: Many people still believe this.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: But no, I have those two keys.
Merlin: If I need the car key, I grab the car key.
Merlin: Two keys.
Merlin: Not having the car key on there also means I drive less.
Merlin: Two keys.
Merlin: I mean, no, the thing is also, like, I don't have a lot of dough.
Merlin: Like, I don't own boats and stuff like that.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to look down on people who do, but, like, to me, that's freedom is fewer keys.
Merlin: Somebody should definitely write that down.
Merlin: Freedom is fewer keys because every key you get is another thing you have to take care of now.
John: I remember when I had zero keys in my 20s.
John: This is when you were living in the minivan?
John: When I was living in the minivan, and I didn't even have a key to it.
Merlin: It was a great story.
Merlin: At one point, that was a huge deal.
Merlin: They're like, here's a key to the house.
Merlin: If you really need it, don't abuse it, right?
John: Yeah, I got a key.
John: And then when I got a job, I got a key to my work.
John: And I had a key to an apartment and a key to my work.
John: And then...
John: I had those two keys for a long time.
John: And then I was like the assistant manager and they gave me a different key.
John: Is this the newsstand?
John: The newsstand.
John: Three keys.
John: And then my mom moved to town and I had a key to her house.
John: Four keys.
John: And I didn't get a car...
John: I didn't get a car in Seattle until I was about 30 years old, and then I had a key to that.
John: And at a certain point, in the early Long Winters tour days, I had like so many keys.
John: I remember.
Merlin: You looked like a superintendent.
Merlin: You had that giant-ass wallet with all the currencies of the world in it and all of the money the band had made.
Merlin: You had a giant, giant trucker's wallet, and you had a huge ring of keys.
Merlin: You looked like a superintendent.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I did.
John: I did.
John: And I was probably wearing a hat that said King Ropes Sheridan, Wyoming, or Marvin's Gas and Go.
John: Tight women loosened here.
John: No.
John: No, for years you had a hat that said Chick Magnet on it.
John: Chick Magnet, because I believe in truth in advertising.
John: But now I have this key ring that's been really good.
John: Office keys, house keys.
John: And now I have a fucking dingus on it.
John: And I just – it's only been on there for the length of this program.
John: I was putting it on my key ring as I was sitting here waiting for you to call.
John: And I'm just looking at it.
John: I'm trying to figure out – the dingus kind of sticks out at an angle from the rest of the keys because – It's so gross.
Merlin: I wouldn't have that on there.
Merlin: I used to have like a little aluminum –
Merlin: Bottle cap opener.
Merlin: You know, one of those super light little things.
Merlin: Even that was too much.
Merlin: I had to take that off of there.
John: So what do I do?
John: Do I put this on a rope around my neck?
John: Do you carry a backpack?
John: Give me a cancer.
John: I carry my briefcase because I am a serious candidate for public office.
Merlin: Well, to me, in my lifestyle, that screams backpack to me.
Merlin: But are you with me a little bit on the hegemony thing?
Merlin: It seems like everything wants to be the center of everything now.
Merlin: And think about how many things are becoming more externalized.
Merlin: Where you used to have – I mean, let's go way back.
Merlin: You would have a pocket watch in your pocket.
Merlin: You'd have a billfold in your jacket.
Merlin: You might have keys.
Merlin: But, like, very few of your items of flair would be external.
Merlin: Now when I go pick up my kid at camp or the zoo, especially with the women, like, I guess they don't want to carry a purse or something.
Merlin: But they're walking around with all this stuff.
Merlin: They have these giant – they're like a jailer with this giant ring of keys to mini, mini, minivans.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: All the little matchboxes on there.
Merlin: They got a phone and maybe an iPad.
Merlin: They got a wallet.
Merlin: People just carry that stuff around with them.
Merlin: It seems so strange to me.
Merlin: I never go anywhere without a jacket and a backpack.
Merlin: You always need a jacket and a backpack.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: With my kid, my wife and I go around on this sometimes where it'll be 70 in the morning.
Merlin: I'm like, listen, I don't care if it's 80.
Merlin: The thing is...
Merlin: Our kid is being raised in San Francisco, and she will learn to always have a jacket.
Merlin: Always.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Never not have a jacket.
Merlin: Because here's the thing.
John: You can take it off.
John: We are Pacific Coast people.
John: Yeah.
John: And you need a jacket, a light jacket.
Merlin: Within five years, most children will be born wearing fleece.
John: I went the other day.
John: I was lucky enough to meet a guy who...
John: runs a company that is devising or building out VR and AR technologies.
John: And I went to their shop.
John: Is AR augmented reality?
John: Augmented reality.
John: I went to their shop and I put on an Oculus headset and I was ushered into a virtual reality universe.
John: And given several tours of different virtual realities.
John: And tried on a couple of headsets, including the one made of cardboard.
John: The Google one?
John: The Google one.
John: Yeah.
John: And some others where you just kind of slip your big Nokia phone into a slot and all of a sudden it functions as a VR.
John: Right, right.
John: And...
John: The state of the technology right now is very new, and a lot of the stuff I was looking at kind of felt like the money for nothing video.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Like very basic wireframe polyhedrons.
John: Look at this guy.
John: I ain't working.
John: Get your money on your MTV.
John: I mean, obviously better than that, but still like...
John: Yeah, this is not – let's not call this reality.
John: But there were some incredible – I mean there was some incredible stuff, footage shot from three-dimensional cameras or like 360-degree cameras where you're flying in a helicopter over beautiful Iceland and you're able to kind of turn your head and look around this place and –
John: And just sort of in – it's not in real time, but you are able to explore a kind of – an environment.
John: And as I was in that world, I felt like, yeah, right, from a gaming standpoint or from a like demo –
John: From job training standpoint or from a touristic standpoint, this type of thing is very interesting.
John: But really, it's augmented reality that is going to be where we live.
John: That's going to be our universe.
John: And I feel like all these...
John: key fobs and iPads and, uh, and this sort of backpack or purse full of Gidget, Gidgets and Gazmos.
John: Um, um,
John: Like where that's all leading is that in our glasses, which we're all going to wear, in our visors, there will be a constant sort of ebb and flow between reality and the augmentation of it.
John: And...
John: You're going to, you know, you're going to look at the, at the lock on your door and it's going to open because it's going to recognize.
John: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That'd be the right triangulation of things.
Merlin: Like, right.
Merlin: That there's you, there's presence.
Merlin: The presence is you, you are looking at it and you know, yeah, exactly.
Merlin: But the right combination of things, there's so many things that AR could change.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You're just so much sooner than VR.
John: Walk around and you just sort of like.
John: I would like to activate the history you know the like our local archives because I want to know when this building was built and when the addition was put on and it's just like pow and then you're like I'm really I'm on the bus I'm really bored right now I would like to bring up some some infotainment but I'm always going to have I'm always going to be able to look through it in order to make sure that nobody steps on my foot or
John: You know, nobody takes me by surprise.
John: And this kind of like in and out of reality is the new reality.
John: And it's so tantalizing to look at it in its germinating stage.
Merlin: It's so primitive right now compared to what it will be.
John: Yeah, and so the endless possibilities of it are truly an evolutionary possibility.
John: We cannot know because...
John: it would be like, it would be like being a lizard and imagining that you had, um, warm blood or something.
John: Like it's just, there's going to be so much, our minds are going to work so much differently.
John: Life is going to be so much different.
John: And, uh, and it's thrilling.
John: And I just, you know, just, just the ability to kind of put on a headset and be in a world, um,
John: And it will always be alien to me, you know, but it won't be to my kid or yours.
John: And I feel like we will always be... We will be mocked and derided, our generation, because we bridged this gap between a purely mechanical world.
John: Like the generation before ours...
John: You know, they went out and worked on their cars on a Saturday.
John: Right.
John: And we have spent our whole lives playing Myst and
John: And the next generation is going to be able to conjure all data at once.
John: And we're going to look at the loonies because we could have done it sooner, right?
John: Or something.
John: Or better, yeah.
John: They're going to see us here with our electric cars.
John: And it's just going to seem so funny.
John: Like, okay, you had the electric car.
John: You kept building highways.
John: Yeah, you didn't quite get it yet.
John: And we had our little phones and we spent all this time using them as phones.
John: Right, right.
John: We're just this connective tissue era where nothing we're actually doing is elegant or...
John: The idea of going down and cruising the strip in your 57 Chevy is so much more elegant than sitting on Facebook on a Saturday night posting huffy, indignant messages to friends.
Merlin: We're going to be best remembered on our good days for not getting in the way too much.
Merlin: You didn't directly stand in the way of incredibly obvious – you know what?
Merlin: Here's the thing I love about you, Grandpa, is that over time, you somehow found a way to be less and less standing exactly in the way of progress.
John: And you're standing there with your iPad that doesn't work because your cloud is full, shaking it and going –
Merlin: God damn it, I just need to upgrade my OS.
Merlin: I just need a fresh heal.
Merlin: When you get a leech on you, is it like in the movies?
Merlin: Does it make a little bloody spot when you pull it off?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: So it's got like teeth?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: It's got teeth.
John: They're squirming and crawling on you, and they're literally like big.
John: They're very big.
John: But they're kind of like a slug looking.
John: They're a little tiny.
John: They're leeches of all sizes.
John: But this particular leech experience, they were leeches as big as slugs, bigger than snails, as big as big Western slugs.
John: Yeah.
John: But they are biting into you and sucking your blood.
Yeah.
John: And that's horrifying.
John: It's horrifying even if you are not somebody who's already horrified by most things, which I was then.
John: Like horrified by strange foods, horrified by sounds in the night, horrified by...
John: in some ways horrified by nature even though i grew up kind of surrounded by nature like i mean i was never horrified by wolves always horrified by bugs i'm kind of like that with birds now we've talked about birds so many times but like little little beady-eyed animals are starting to freak me out more so birds are are the thing that are getting under your skin
Merlin: I mean, I get around okay, but as long as I don't think about it too much.
Merlin: But when I think about birds and the way that they move, it's troubling to me.
Merlin: Like watching a pigeon move makes me very uncomfortable.
John: When they're on the ground or when they're in the air?
Merlin: They're pretty elegant in the air.
Merlin: When they're doing that quirky little herky-jerky dance when they're walking around.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And then people feed them.
John: Yeah.
John: You try to imagine what they're thinking, a pigeon.
John: I mean, I'm now engaged in a process of trying to rid my house of the possum.
John: Oh, it's a project now.
John: It's a project, and I've got some possum traps in the basement and in the attic.
John: The possum has so far now, we're going into day three, day four.
John: The possum has avoided the traps, but has also been kind of not around.
John: I have not heard the possum.
John: But I'm trying to imagine the possum.
John: Imagine what he's thinking when he arrives, sees the trap.
John: Smells the bait in the dark.
Merlin: In his little bachelor pad.
John: In his pad.
John: He's like, wait a minute.
John: Something new is here.
John: Smells good.
John: Looks weird.
John: Like where he goes in his possum mind.
John: Right now where he goes is out back outside or something.
John: He's not...
John: He's not falling for it.
John: So I hope I don't have like the smart possum.
John: That would be so miserable.
John: If you had an infestation of smart possums?
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: No, like where they've got a learning thing.
Merlin: You know, like the crows.
Merlin: Like if you cross a possum, I don't want to think about it.
Merlin: I don't want to think about it, but you cross a possum with a crow, you've got some serious problems.
John: Now let's think about that for a second.
John: How much, what needs to happen in the possum community
John: where they can achieve what the crow community has been doing for years.
Merlin: The ability to share information with large groups of other members of the tribe.
John: Yep, and I think the problem is possums are solitary, and it's that their lack of social connection, they're never going to get as smart as the crows.
Merlin: I hope they keep those labs in different states.
Merlin: I want the possum lab and the crow lab.
Merlin: I don't want them to even have each other's phone number.
Merlin: I just want them in different places.
Merlin: Oh, think about that.
Merlin: Somebody gets fired, wants to cause a little trouble.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: They introduce a virus that makes possums social.
Merlin: Maybe.
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
Merlin: This jar falls in this Petri dish.
Merlin: Whoops.
John: And all of a sudden, possums are congregating.
Merlin: And you hear up in your attic here.
Merlin: Because they're having little conversations about you and how funny it is that you think that trap works.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: When you come out of the house, they're just kind of standing there.
John: On your porch, just looking at you?
Merlin: Just without affect.
Merlin: They're not scared.
Merlin: They're not happy.
Merlin: They're not anything.
Merlin: They're just there.
Merlin: They're just there.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This is my house.
Merlin: It's my house too now, buddy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Just wanted you to know that we're here.
Merlin: Like you do with the crows.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: They're pulling the crow move on you.
Merlin: I am here.
Merlin: I see you.
John: I'm here.
John: I see you, John.
Merlin: I see you, John.
Merlin: Well done.
Merlin: Oh, God almighty.