Ep. 164: "In Your Face, Paraguay"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: This month, they asked Jonathan Mann to help me say hi to John.
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Merlin: That's a cover.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: Oh, is that right?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: That's our song this month.
Merlin: Oh, I love it already.
Merlin: It's pretty catchy.
Merlin: It is.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Some canny songwriter figured out a good cadence for our name.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: It's a gift.
John: Audric on the line.
Merlin: Audric on the line.
Merlin: Hello, hello, hello.
Merlin: Hello, hello, hello.
Merlin: That's what we say.
Merlin: That's what he says.
Merlin: Then he says something about grabbing your turpentine, which feels like a little bit of a throwaway.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
John: Well, you know.
John: We haven't ever talked about turpentine ever.
Merlin: High slugging percentage.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: This is the big week, huh?
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
John: Tomorrow is election day.
John: Oh, my God.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: You've been doing this since, what, May?
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I mean, you know, let's see.
Merlin: I mean, obviously, you've been preparing your whole life.
John: Well, I don't know about that either.
John: So I started talking about it.
John: to people probably in January and then by March it was fully people were rallying I was rallying and then we declared in
John: second week of april so when did the super pack get formed the super pack is still forming um the thing is you're not allowed to be directly involved with that right i can't and unlike other super packs this one truly is super because uh the number of nerds that support my campaign actually form a kind of hall of justice
John: if you will.
John: Does that include Hawkman?
John: Yeah, it does.
John: And they're working on their invisible plane right now, and they have to build a crystal cathedral.
Merlin: Wonder Woman, man.
Merlin: She gets all the good stuff.
John: She does, yeah.
John: And the crystal cathedral, also great.
John: That was for sale at some point.
John: Did they turn that into a mall?
John: What happened with that?
John: Is that right?
John: I can't imagine that they would deconsecrate it.
Merlin: Well, there were problems.
Merlin: There were problems.
John: Like leaky roof, you mean?
John: Or...
Merlin: Well, you know, nobody said Crystal was going to be waterproof.
Merlin: I don't know, but Reverend Shuler passed.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then I think his son took over, and I think they turned it into like an Orange Julius.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: I haven't kept up.
Merlin: I don't read the trades.
John: Actually, you know, no one said Crystal was going to be waterproof.
John: That was the working slogan for a sex worker I knew.
John: I thought that was a Charles Bukowski poem.
John: Oh, I think about the same person.
Merlin: It's for all my friends.
John: Oh, man.
John: Big week.
John: Big week.
John: Welcome back.
John: It's been so long since I talked to you.
John: I missed you and you were gone.
John: I was worried about you.
John: Why?
John: Why were you worried about me?
John: And then I wasn't replying to your text.
John: So then I was worried that you were worried.
John: Oh, there's just so much worry.
John: Because you were out of your comfort.
John: You were out of your place.
John: You were somewhere else, and I was anxious for you.
Merlin: Oh, thank you.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: There's good reason.
Merlin: Yeah, no, I had to go to two or three different places.
John: Oh, my God.
John: For over a couple weeks, I had to travel and do things.
John: Oh, no.
John: My inner Merlin is already rejecting this possibility.
Merlin: You know, I just got to notice less.
Merlin: I just got to notice things less than I do fine.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: No, but it was fine.
Merlin: You know, it was pretty good.
Merlin: We had some family time with, you know, family on the East Coast.
Merlin: And then I had to go to PDX.
Merlin: I was back in town for 36 hours and then went to PDX for four or five days.
Merlin: Got a Pendleton shirt pretty excited about.
John: Does it go?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Does it fit you?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I got it big.
Merlin: They say the Pendleton board shirt is wool, and yet it is machine washable.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: And I want this to be a 20-year shirt.
Merlin: So I got it big because I figured I'll wash it sometimes.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, you've got to get a Pendleton shirt a little big.
John: That's the tradition.
John: But you actually can wash those things and put them in the dryer, and the shrinkage is minimal.
Merlin: I don't understand anything anymore.
Merlin: Between sous vide and washable wool, I'm completely lost.
Merlin: But I look like Harry Potter in the first movie, like wearing his stepbrother or his adopted brother's clothes.
Merlin: They're huge.
Merlin: It's huge on me.
John: I never saw the Harry Potter movies.
Merlin: Never seen any of them.
John: No.
John: Is that something I should do?
John: Should I...
Merlin: Well, you know, I learned from the 16 hours of programming you did with Dan.
Merlin: I didn't learn.
Merlin: I'm reminded about how much you're interested in the magics.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: Poof.
Merlin: Let's wait until the primary's over, but I want to talk about that more.
Merlin: Abracadabra.
Merlin: I think about it a lot.
Merlin: But, you know, they're all good.
Merlin: I would say if you want one and only one, watch the third one.
John: Wow, just go right into the third one.
John: I don't even need to learn the rules of Quidditch.
John: I'll figure that out along the way.
Merlin: Quidditch is the biggest scam, inclusive, including stadium deals.
John: It's the biggest scam in the history of sports.
John: We're going to get so many angry emails.
Merlin: I think I told you about this, but Quidditch, it's a total scam.
Merlin: Yeah, it's a scam.
John: It's a scam.
John: So on my way down here, I was thinking about this movie project that I've been working on for a long time.
John: Okay.
John: Screenplay that I've been mulling over.
John: Which is basically neighborhood stick fights, which we've talked about many times.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Neighborhood stick fights as a...
John: as an organizing principle of a future society.
Merlin: It's like Hunger Games meets the Warriors.
John: Yeah, well, in the sense that Hunger Games, the reason, I guess, that it's popular, well, is that it's populated with cute people.
John: But but, you know, there's a blurb Hunger Games turns on the idea that people are forced by a controlling and dystopian future society to fight in this arena against one another.
John: And the and the heroin is always protecting the weak and, you know, and.
Merlin: And they're fighting off a certain kind of municipal original sin.
Merlin: Basically, these kids have to fight as tribute because there was rebelliousness at one time.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: This is their punishment, and this is how they keep rebellion down in the provinces or whatever.
John: But my premise is that neighborhood stick fighting is something that a free society would willingly and enthusiastically enter into—
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: It's more like Hunger Games meets your company's softball team.
John: Yeah, or like, you know, or The Longest Yard.
John: What was the football game that took place in prison?
John: That was The Longest Yard.
John: Ah, there we go.
John: I think it was Mr. Burt Reynolds.
John: That's right.
John: So it's, I mean, maybe The Longest Yard is a bad example, but, you know, but they are, but the idea being that people would self-organize into tribes as they already do, like on the way in today,
John: So the Blue Angels and all the Seafair airplanes are all getting out of Dodge today.
John: They're all kind of, you know, like the party's over.
John: And Boeing Field... Did you have Fleet Week?
John: Yeah.
John: Okay.
John: Boeing Field two days ago was just like a... It was a menagerie of all the different kinds of airplanes.
John: There were three different performing air show squadrons.
John: There was a...
John: There was a Marine Corps Osprey.
John: There were biplanes and, you know, just the whole, just a camp train of followers that chase the Blue Angels around.
John: And they're all getting out of here.
John: And so all weekend long, all along Boeing Field, there's been a collection of airplane nerds who park their trucks and basically tailgate next to the airport just to watch the planes take off and land.
John: In some ways, the most exciting part of any flight is the takeoff or the landing.
John: But also, in another way, not at all is that the most exciting part.
Merlin: Isn't it like NASCAR?
Merlin: Isn't that when you're most likely to have a wreck?
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: That's where all the bad things happen.
John: All the good wrecks happen on the ground.
John: But, you know, watching a bunch of airplanes come in and flare and touch down, it's like, whee!
John: But, you know, in Seattle, the city of, let's say the general area has got a million people or so,
John: That's enough to put 50 people down.
John: A million people will generate between 50 and 100 people who just want to watch planes take off and land.
John: And some of them are those people with the big white lenses on their cameras who are obviously taking pictures to sell to Jane's aircraft manual if they still make that.
John: But as I'm driving in, so I'm driving along and I see the airplane people.
John: Now it's just the dribs and dregs of them.
John: Maybe there's 15 or 20 left who are the Blue Angels are gone.
John: Now they're just watching like the they're watching the experimental ultralights take off.
John: And and and I'm thinking like there's a self-selecting group of people who care about a certain aspect of airplane culture.
John: And this is how they're spending their Monday morning.
John: And then I drove through Georgetown and passed a bus stop.
John: And at the bus stop, there was a small group of people who looked like they had wandered out of a Comic-Con.
John: They had the whole look.
John: One of them might have been in a Utila kilt.
John: There was a guy with a sort of dishwater blonde ponytail.
John: Their jackets had lots of buttons and badges on them.
John: Somebody might have had a stuffed animal on a lanyard around their neck.
John: Pretty sure there was a My Little Pony component to someone's socks.
John: And I'm like, okay, now there's another group of people self-selecting into a little tribe.
John: I don't know why they're here, why they're waiting at this bus stop, where they would have come from, where they're going.
John: And then I started thinking about my stick fighting screenplay.
Merlin: This is why I like the Warriors part.
Merlin: I like the idea of whatever group you're coming together with, there's a strong brand presence.
John: Strong brand.
John: That's exactly right.
John: The Warriors is a perfect example, right?
John: You don't fuck with the Wongs.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Or you get those baseball guys, the baseball furies.
John: Yeah, or the guys in the silk suits.
John: And so I'm thinking, but here's the question for you, and this is something I feel like we should pose to our listeners.
John: There have to be some combat rules.
John: You don't want to just... Because if there weren't any combat rules, the snipers would win every time.
Merlin: Oh, right, right.
John: You can't just be a free-for-all.
Merlin: It was never intended to be a fight to the death.
Merlin: That's why it's a stick fight.
John: It's a stick fight.
John: That's right.
John: But like...
John: But so there need to be combat rules, but those combat rules need to also incorporate modern technology because some of the tribes are going to be technologists.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Right?
John: So if you're just like, oh, sorry, you can only fight with sticks, there's going to be some group of people that work as engineers for Blue Origins, for instance, who are going to be like, we've invented a better stick.
John: And our stick is made out of this, and it performs the following way.
Merlin: And this way it becomes a little bit like the robot wars, where you make a little robot, fight another robot.
Merlin: But there are rules.
John: There have got to be rules.
Merlin: It could be a weight thing.
Merlin: It could be a materials thing.
Merlin: But they're going to hack on that with technology to make a better stick.
John: That's right.
John: And there are going to be some people that – they're going to be – like I imagine one component of the nerd stick fight quadrant –
John: are going to be like the dwarves or whatever.
John: They're going to be a bunch of bearded guys who like to dress like dwarves in Lord of the Rings.
John: Not little people, but miners and forgers.
John: Yeah, right.
John: They're going to be probably normally-sized adult people, but who really admire the dwarf aesthetic.
John: OK.
John: Right.
John: And they get the kind of chain mail leather, long braided beards, long hair.
John: Right.
John: And what's strange to me is I never have seen a group of six or seven fully grown adult men rocking that look, traveling together as a tribe.
Merlin: A clutch of dwarves.
Merlin: Not a clutch, I guess, but a handful of dwarves.
John: Yeah, what would you call a group of fighting dwarves?
John: A teacup?
John: No.
Merlin: No, a... A tempest?
John: A tempest of dwarves?
Merlin: Yeah, I'd have to think about it, but there's so much to like about this.
Merlin: Yeah, this is something else to put to our group.
Merlin: You gave this way more thought than I realized.
John: Well, you know, it's a 15-minute drive in.
John: I mean, there's a lot of time to think.
John: But then it occurred to me if I'm writing a screenplay, right, I want it to be realistic.
John: And so what we would have to do is we would have to establish a set of rules for combat and then imagine through the course of the history of this –
John: neighborhood stick fighting culture where different groups had hacked the rules and corollary rules had been imposed to accommodate, you know, or to like reign them in.
John: And so, you know, you want the rules of combat to not be too arcane, but they also have to reflect, you know, they have to kind of reflect the evolution of the game.
Yeah.
John: Right.
Merlin: I'm thinking specifically about baseball and how the game has changed over time as they change the ball.
Merlin: There was a time when I guess it was probably legal to do a spitball, and they said, you know what?
Merlin: You're not allowed to do that anymore.
Merlin: That's not fair.
John: That's right.
John: Can't do that.
Merlin: They have to level it.
Merlin: Or, you know, you change, like, you know, the height of the goalposts.
Merlin: You standardize things for neighborhood stick fight to really catch on to become viral, if you like.
Merlin: There has to be some consistency between the different neighborhoods.
John: Right.
John: I mean, when they changed the height of the goalposts in baseball, that really altered the way the game was played.
John: It was hard to get a hat trick.
Yeah.
John: So I feel like I feel like that's something that, you know, I would I think I would call Neil Stevenson or something and say, like, how would you imagine?
John: Could you could you imagine the assuming that neighborhood stick fighting was something that we were 80 years into?
John: Right.
John: We'd been we'd been doing this for a while.
Merlin: I do some world building.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And the stick fighting had been happening and the early days were scrappy and there were some people, some fans that were like, it's not like it used to be, boy.
John: Stick fighting used to be really awesome before they put in the onside fly rule or whatever.
John: But now it had become more and more professionalized.
John: I keep imagining backstage acting.
John: at the Neighborhood Stick Fight Championship where all the different groups, you know, there's the monks and there's the... It's really like the Warriors.
John: What am I talking about?
Merlin: Check out that link I sent you.
John: I'm just rewriting the... No, no, no.
Merlin: Check out that link.
Merlin: It's a page dedicated to all of the gangs.
Merlin: Of the Warriors.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I'm so happy already.
Merlin: The Electric Eliminators.
Merlin: You got the Gladiators.
Merlin: I think you might have been thinking of the Boppers.
Merlin: They wore purple hats and waistcoats.
John: That's right.
John: The Boppers.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Baseball Furies.
Merlin: And I always forget about the Hi-Hats.
John: Oh, the Hi-Hats.
John: Come on.
John: They're mimes.
John: Oh, they're so good.
John: They're so good watching them go through the turnstiles.
John: Watching the Hi-Hats go through the turnstiles.
John: And then, yeah, the Baseball Furies.
John: Savage Huns.
John: That's the one.
John: The Savage Huns are from Chinatown.
John: So let me ask you this, though.
John: So, for instance, taser.
John: Let's say you take a taser in.
John: Taser doesn't kill people at a distance, really, or it doesn't hurt them at a distance.
John: That's one of the things.
John: Like, I don't want weapons that allow you to... There's no room for snipers in neighborhood stick fights.
John: That's right.
John: But a taser?
John: Could you get away with a kind of a modified taser?
John: I'm no Neil Stevenson.
Merlin: But I think it's got to be – I think we can in some ways use baseball as a template because baseball started out as being this thing where all the fields were different.
Merlin: And I guess they're still kind of different.
Merlin: But I mean the distance between the bases and stuff could be really random.
Merlin: I think there's two major areas to focus on, which are the logistics, materials, and construction of the sticks.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: and then how you're allowed to attack.
Merlin: So like in soccer, if you suddenly decide to start grabbing the ball and running around, they'd say, hey, dickhead, put down the ball.
Merlin: That's not cool, right?
Merlin: But I mean, I think you do have to start with the stick.
Merlin: I'm thinking you have things like material, weight, length, and circumference.
Merlin: Is it a uniform length?
Merlin: Can it be tapered?
Merlin: Does it have to be a found stick?
Merlin: Can you lathe your own?
John: The thing is you can't sharpen them because then it's a spear.
John: Oh, right.
John: So there's got to be...
John: And I guess ultimately, like you can kill somebody with a stick pretty easily.
John: So I do feel I feel like for this science fiction story to really to really capture what I'm.
John: what I'm trying to say about humanity, I think it does have to be fatal at times.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: I think it always has to be there.
Merlin: In my head, I'm imagining, and I know this will change once we Stevensonize it a little bit, but I think it's a bunch of people on a field with essentially like broomsticks.
Merlin: So you can use it like a staff, you can use it like a sword, or you can use it like a cudgel.
Merlin: Or all of those things.
John: You can spin it.
John: There's no admonition not to spin.
John: That's right.
John: No, you absolutely spin.
John: You could even throw, but you're going to then... I mean, you know what they say about neighborhood stick fights.
John: You throw your stick and then... You get no stick.
John: That's right.
John: That stick's going to get stuck right up you.
John: That's one of the... You know, because they're going to be sportscasters and they're going to have their own sayings.
Merlin: Is there one stick for the team or does everybody have a stick?
Merlin: Well, or is it a Hunger Games situation where there are kind of sticks and cudgels and shillelies and stuff all like... When you originally pitched this idea, I imagined it the way it would have happened when you're kids, which is you're out in the woods and you find a stick and then you start hitting people with it.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: There's something to that.
Merlin: But I think once you professionalize this, and I assume it will have some aspect of, if not even, maybe it'll be more like a football thing where nobody gets paid.
Merlin: But you get a free education, but you can have a stick, a bespoke stick that you make as long as it's within, like a baseball bat, right?
Merlin: You can have your old, what's it called, golden boy?
Merlin: What's he called?
John: Yeah, you can have your golden boy.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: You and your dad can craft it out of a tree that was hit by lightning.
Merlin: Like Brian May.
John: Yeah, you can rewind your own pickups or out of the mantelpiece of your childhood fireplace.
Merlin: Oh, it was burned down by dwarves and now you've got a reason.
John: So here's a question.
John: So originally the idea was that it was kind of a gladiator contest where it was taking place in a coliseum.
John: And people, you know, the bread and circuses people were up in the stands kind of, you know, hurling encouragement and epithets down.
John: But then as the game evolved in my mind, I realized that so surveillance culture has to play into any kind of future games sports, right?
John: We're seeing surveillance culture, GoPros.
John: Revolutionize the...
John: the like experience of sports.
John: And ever since football got those strange cameras that track the action overhead, you know, watching football is very different now than even a few years ago.
John: And it won't be long.
John: I don't think before there are cameras embedded on football players so that you're really having super slow-mo GoPro action.
John: But what that enables us to do is have a sort of stadium, uh,
John: But you know where special forces and like SWAT teams train?
John: They have those fake cities.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Fake little villages out in the country where it's a bunch of cinder block buildings and they practice like going into buildings.
John: And it's kind of like paintball or laser tag.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Like where a little – like a wooden thing pops out of the building and you got to shoot the burglar but not the baby.
John: Yes, thank you.
John: Exactly.
John: Shoot the burglar, not the baby.
John: If I were sportscasting this, that would be one of my adages.
John: That would be one of your catchphrases.
John: Somebody would accidentally whack their friend and I'd be like, there you go, Merlin, there it is.
John: I say it over and over, shoot the burglar, not the baby.
John: Right.
John: Then that then T-shirts would get made.
John: Yep.
John: People would know me as that guy.
Merlin: But on the one hand, it's a very it's very primitive in many ways.
Merlin: It's civilized in the sense that there are rules.
Merlin: But then there's also a high tech component.
Merlin: And that's that's where you really get people excited about it.
Merlin: But as participants and as as viewers.
John: So we could build in the center of the stadium a kind of Cinderella's castle.
John: meets SWAT team training ground, a big, you know, multi-layered set of buildings and laser tag, you know, ramps and all this stuff with GoPro cameras all around it.
John: And then the tech aspect of it, of course, is that you're watching, you're watching on multiple screens, you're watching replays and, and you can, you can see, you can see more than the players can see.
Merlin: Okay, and maybe, I don't know exactly how this works, but you figure there's what people on the field know and what their teams know, and they've got their own surveillance means.
Merlin: You've got what the people in the crowd know, and then you've got what the viewers at home know, and that information could potentially become passed around.
Merlin: Maybe there's a cache of sticks, you know, hidden somewhere inside Cinderella's castle, or maybe like an old lady could, like in Hunger Games, maybe she could buy you a nice fleece and have it mailed to you as a sponsorship.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: And, and, and there's a, you know, there's that kind of like, oh, you know, like, uh, like horror movie aspect where it's like, don't go in there.
John: Oh no, don't go in there.
John: Like people are, you know, really, um, they are participating, you know, and people in the stadium are having a different experience, of course, than people at home, but there's a, there's that, that, uh, the tension of, of, of having omniscience.
Merlin: Yeah, and also, I mean, I don't like to bring in the pro wrestling too much because I know I go on and on about it.
Merlin: But to me, that's a big component of this where you never know what's going to happen.
Merlin: There might be another neighborhood stick fight team inside the castle and you just don't know it yet.
Merlin: Or maybe somebody from your neighborhood is in the audience.
Merlin: They jump in, they grab a stick and start helping out.
John: So now once we've established the actual, you know, like the combat, now the next part of this world building that we have to do is how exactly are –
John: our social problems, how are we feeding this stick fighting socially globally?
John: What are we resolving there?
John: Okay.
Merlin: For example, I'm not saying, but I'm just tossing out, is it cause-based?
John: Well, I mean, if you are from Brazil and your team wins the World Cup,
John: you have a lot of smack to talk to people from Uruguay for a while, right?
John: I mean, I drive around Seattle, well, every day, let's be honest.
John: And the number of people who are still crowing about the Super Bowl two years ago in the form of some kind of logo on the back of their Escalade.
Merlin: Plus, it's always nice to throw Paraguay a little bit of shade.
John: You know what?
John: Paraguay has got a lot to answer for.
John: But so what I'm saying is escalating that or rather turning the dial up on that a little bit so that it's not just bragging rights.
John: It's not just like in your face Paraguay.
John: Like actual disputes are resolved by the neighborhood stick fighting teams.
John: Because I feel like as you ramp up the violence...
John: You also have to have a corresponding increase in the stakes, not just the stakes for the team, right?
John: Those guys are going to get more hurt than, you know, like they are volunteering to get more hurt than in a football game.
John: But they do that because the prospect is greater that their success will change people's lives.
Merlin: Oh, so it could be tied to something like the passage of a insurance bill.
John: Right.
John: That would be sort of a regional.
Merlin: It becomes a kind of referendum.
Merlin: Like in California, like if you don't like the way people park, you can go and start your own initiative, get people to sign up.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And then get people to sign on.
Merlin: It gets on the ballot and you can vote.
Merlin: Maybe this becomes a kind of public primary for certain kinds of big ideas.
John: Precisely.
John: So people are like, you know what?
John: I don't like rail transit.
John: Right.
John: I think it's a bad idea.
John: I think it's too expensive.
John: And then the other people are like, rail transit is the only solution to modern urban expansion in cities.
Merlin: I think you could take it even smaller.
Merlin: I mean, even on your local high school football field, you could work out whether or not there should be a stop sign somewhere.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: I mean, kind of, right?
Merlin: On the football field.
Merlin: Well, I mean, the stop sign wouldn't be there.
Merlin: But I mean, I know you're not, across the board, a giant fan of four-way stops.
Merlin: Oh, no, I don't like them.
Merlin: So I can guess which side you'd be on.
John: That's right.
John: Oh, so you're saying, like, let's mount some teams.
John: Yeah, you'd be on the stop stoppers.
John: So then this is how the leagues work out, right?
John: You start down at really the neighborhood level, where it's like, I think that we need to spend...
John: we need to float a $2 million bond to paint all the fire hydrants in the port a bright color so they don't get backed over.
John: And your opposition is like, that is a ludicrous way to spend that money.
John: And it's like, stick fight.
John: Yep, you're going to get pushback from big truck.
John: And then you work your way up the ranks, so then you're basically on the county stick fighting team and you're adjudicating the school board budget.
John: And then just imagine how much zoning stuff you could settle that way.
John: Right.
John: And then, but then all the way up to like, I'm on the Palestinian team.
John: and we are deciding with this match whether or not there are going to be any more settlements.
John: Oh, I get everything's on the line.
John: That's right.
John: And it's like everybody agrees this is an intractable problem.
John: We've been trying to solve it with diplomacy.
John: We've been trying to solve it with war.
John: We've been trying to solve it with terrorism, and we have failed to solve it.
John: So does everybody agree stick fighting is the way that we solve all these other problems?
Merlin: Yeah, it's like when subtlety and civility and adult conversation fails, maybe it's time to pick up a stick.
John: Maybe it's time.
John: Thank you.
John: To pick up a stick.
John: Then see, that's another great catchphrase.
John: And I feel like that maybe is a league.
John: At some point, that was the phrase for the league.
John: Pick up the stick.
John: You know what?
John: At a certain point, you got to pick up the stick.
John: So but this is a lot of world building.
John: in order to then distill it down to write a script for a romantic comedy.
Merlin: Oh, is there a meet cute?
Merlin: Maybe people on different sides of the stick fight meet?
Merlin: Of course, at the core of the movie, there's got to be... Well, it changes everything.
Merlin: I didn't know it was a rom-com.
Merlin: That's terrific.
John: I mean, what other kind of movie is there, right?
John: I don't want to... The problem with Hunger Games is it's so hysterical, and yet there's a rom-com at the center of it, right?
John: I mean, everybody's just like, oh, it's so weepy.
Merlin: I think that's a tenet of young adult fiction.
Merlin: Maybe you're thinking more of like old adult fiction.
John: But I mean when you and I were – when we were young adults, was our young adult fiction that weepy?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I think it's gotten a lot more edgy over time.
Merlin: You got a lot more vampires and implicit intercourse.
Merlin: There's no room for intercourse on the stick field.
John: Although, I have to say, the original Red Dawn film, and I'm sorry that I even had to appellate the original, but that was pretty histrionic.
John: There was a lot of like...
John: There were a lot of young men over emoting in that movie.
Merlin: I see so many directions you can go.
Merlin: I mean, I know you're pretty busy right now, but I mean, you know, I think it helps also think in terms of the franchise, right?
Merlin: Like they knew there was going to be a whole bunch of those Hunger Games films.
Merlin: You know, they discovered in time they wanted to make more Star Wars movies.
Merlin: If you're going to build a world, then you get to decide how that story is told.
Merlin: So maybe the first one, the one that really gets them, the Avengers of stick fighting, is like there's the one big movie where there's lots of big fights and stuff like that.
Merlin: But you could also have stuff like then go to a prequel that explains the genesis of stick fighting from those primitive simple days before GoPros.
John: Right, I see.
John: So we start somewhere way down.
Merlin: You've got to really grab them, John.
Merlin: You've got to grab them early on with the dwarves and the hi-hats and all the really big characters in the stick fight.
John: Yeah, the yo-yos, the xylophones, the stevedores.
John: You've got the ding-a-lings.
John: You've got the backups.
John: Shanghai sultans.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: And so those guys are all...
John: We fade in on a scene.
John: See, you know, the way I originally imagined this was that I think I was backstage at Madison Square Garden or something.
John: I'm walking around and there's all these different tribes of people wandering around backstage in this cavernous environment.
John: And I kind of just started to see them, my eyes kind of unfocused.
John: And I was like, you know, what if that group of people, and I think we talked about this in the original stick fighting episode where it was like that girl that I met with the Nike swoosh tattoo.
Merlin: Oh, right.
John: I was like the Nike that girl is branding herself for the rest of her life with Nike.
John: And and so I was but I was watching these people walk by and I was like, now, what if every one of those people walking past.
John: was wearing a kind of a tunic that that kind of was a was a call out to the crusades right like here come the here come the christians they've all got a they've all got a big cross on their chest and then here you know here are the like those big dressing gowns
John: Like a big dressing gown with your emblem on it.
Merlin: Instead of a lion rampant, you got a Tide logo.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: But in the future, Islam is a killer brand.
John: But so is Coca-Cola.
John: It's true.
John: They're a different kind of killer.
John: And so what if Team Islam is pitted against Team Coca-Cola in the regional finals?
Merlin: I don't think there's any reason that can't happen.
Merlin: I think as you advance to higher levels...
Merlin: I think you're going to see some really unusual pairings.
Merlin: You might see Portland hog butchers versus a former congressman.
John: Here come the Nebraska Methodists, and they are in a pitch battle with the Chevy Volt.
Merlin: Right, coming off a huge win against the ladies trying to use expired coupons at Walgreens.
John: Precisely.
Merlin: I would not want to face those ladies.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: They are tough.
Merlin: They do not stay down.
John: Well, and there absolutely should be some kind of... I mean, this is the thing.
John: How do you handicap?
John: Because you don't want to put the coupon ladies up against...
John: like the modern dwarves.
Merlin: I would.
Merlin: I would love to see that.
Merlin: But you do it in boxing, right?
Merlin: You do it, in that case, by weight.
Merlin: Yeah, I guess it's by weight.
Merlin: But you still figure out who is the greatest pound-for-pound stick fight team.
Merlin: Right.
John: Thank you.
Merlin: Okay, here's my question.
Merlin: This is so critical to the whole narrative, but I'm still not exactly sure.
Merlin: I have a good idea of what a stick fight is for or how it ends when it's a bunch of 11-year-old boys hitting each other.
Merlin: what is the goal or how do you win the neighborhood stick fight?
John: Well, that's the thing because, because we are talking about really, we're talking about solving really weighty disputes that the, the end has to be, there has to be satisfaction, right?
John: The, we have to get, we, the people have to get satisfaction.
John: If I am pitting, if I, if I am watching Nike, uh,
John: go up against... I mean, because it's not just Nike against Adidas.
John: It's Nike against... No, no, no.
Merlin: That's the kind of narrow thinking that neighborhood stick fighting is going to just get rid of.
John: Right.
John: This is Nike against Apple or Nike against Paraguay.
John: And it's like, what are the stakes between Nike and Paraguay?
John: And if Nike wins, Nike tennis shoes beats Paraguay the country.
John: What does Paraguay...
Merlin: have to cede to them oh yeah kind of like when the two cities go up against each other and the mayors have a playful bet about sending oranges or uh or you know philly cheesesteak or something like that to the other guy right so but it has to be you know like the but something has to be settled i get you you're saying this works on two levels there's what gets settled on the field with sticks and what is consequently by extension being settled by that victory
John: That's right.
Merlin: The adjudication of the stickball or the stick fight.
John: So what ends up deciding the match in the ring is, does this result deliver satisfaction to the parties involved?
John: Do they feel satisfied?
John: So if it's a case where it's like, whack, whack, whack, ow, okay, I quit.
John: And it's like, wait a minute, no, no.
John: like hundreds of square miles of forest just were transferred from one organization to another.
Merlin: Oh, and this brings up another interesting point then.
Merlin: So can you hire out, can you be like the Yankees and hire out like the best team based on money or does it have to be people who have a stake in that?
John: Well, so this is my feeling and this is why I call it neighborhood stick fights and not professional stick fights.
John: Because my feeling about professional sports is as soon as it became a free agency and sports were disconnected from their region, it's all just metaphor now.
John: These baseball players just play for everybody at the end of their career.
John: Yeah.
John: And they show up, I mean, Ichiro shows up at Safeco Field in a Yankees uniform.
John: Well, if you can use the phrase Utah Jazz without laughing.
John: Thank you.
John: The Utah Jazz.
John: So I do feel like the point of the stick fighting is your group, your vested group puts up your best fighters from within the group.
John: But the problem with that, of course, is that there are lots of
John: groups who by definition are not going to have as good of fighters, right?
John: Like the, like team coder.
John: is not going to put up, I mean, it's going to probably have a lot of big guys, but not a lot of tough guys.
Merlin: I get you.
John: And so you have to also be able to use the strength of your group, right?
John: Like the coupon ladies.
Merlin: Oh, boy, they are strong.
John: And they have to be able to work as a group.
John: They have to use their strategy.
John: So the game would have to be modified.
John: In the coupon ladies thing, the point of the game might be that you have to get through the checkout and back home before the ramen boils over.
Merlin: I just think at a neighborhood level, it could be something really – I don't want to be too on the nose.
Merlin: It could be something as simple as the ladies trying to use expired coupons at Walgreens versus, let's just say it, Walgreens employees.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: I mean, there's just so many ways that this world could unfold.
Merlin: Here's what I'm saying.
Merlin: This helps me too.
Merlin: Because the thing is, if they really toss and it's a sanctioned neighborhood stick fight, and just for the sake of argument, let's say the ladies with the expired coupons win.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, I really hope that doesn't happen.
Merlin: But if they win, then from now on at a corporate level, Walgreens has got to take expired coupons.
Merlin: End of story.
Merlin: If you want a rematch, then there's got to be some kind of stakes where there's some skin in the game.
Merlin: But that's what you're saying.
Merlin: This goes way beyond the field.
John: Right now, I would... See, there are a lot of things where I would say, listen, stick fighting is my idea, but it's not a thing.
John: I'm not actually going to get down on the field and stick fight.
John: I mean, I'm up in the head office.
John: I'm up there counting the money.
John: I'm not a stick fighter, right?
John: I'm an empresario.
Merlin: You're a stick lover.
John: But if you pitted Value Village Management...
John: against an ad hoc team of Value Village customers who are tired of filling out or who are tired of collecting 20 stamps on their stamp card.
John: to get 25% off only to arrive with their filled out stamp card and find that the promotion is over and the dates, you know, it was only good for three weeks.
John: And now the time that you took and all the effort that you're carrying this stamp card around and pulling it out and getting it stamped, you got 20 stamps or something, and it's like, oh, we're not honoring those anymore.
John: Value Village does that every, they do that 15 times a year.
Merlin: Oh, they're doing a switcheroo.
John: They do a switcheroo.
John: They're like, hey, are you filling out our stamp card?
John: And you're like, no thanks.
John: And they're like, really?
John: I mean, I'm going to put three stamps on it for this purchase.
John: And you're like, okay, go ahead.
John: Give me the stamp card.
John: And they put the stamps on it.
John: And then for like three weeks, every time you go into Value Village, you're like, I got a stamp card.
John: And they're like, great.
John: And they stamp it.
John: And then you finally get to 20.
John: And then you go in the next time and you're like, 25% off.
John: And they're like, oh, that promotion ended May 1st.
John: Oh, geez.
John: So it's not like a coffee cart thing where the stamp card, you could go into your coffee cart with a stamp card from four years ago and they'll still give you that espresso.
John: It's some kind of bullshit trick.
John: And so I have written several.
Merlin: You talk about demanding satisfaction.
Merlin: I would be livid.
Merlin: I had to look on the Google for this.
Merlin: This is Value Village is a thing.
Merlin: It's used clothing.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's a thrift store, but it's a for-profit.
John: Yeah, but I noticed on the sign it says Donation Center.
John: You can donate – so Value Village is a funny business model.
John: They do a little switcheroo on you.
John: They do a lot of switcheroos on you.
John: But the big one is like Goodwill takes your donations and they employ people and they have training centers and they are a nonprofit organization.
Merlin: They're kind of a goodwill.
Merlin: It seems to me that goodwill, the more I learn about goodwill, the more fascinating they seem because they seem like a charitable pyramid scheme where they want people to come in.
Merlin: You come in and go, oh, there's a lot of value to be had here.
Merlin: This is a nice vintage stationary.
Merlin: And you say, oh, well, you know, if you're somebody who has a disability, you could also work here.
Merlin: So they're training people.
Merlin: Isn't it a little bit like not a Ponzi scheme, but a little bit of a pyramid scheme.
Merlin: You might come in as a customer and leave as an assistant manager and be getting helped.
John: There is so much going on behind the walls at a Goodwill that I don't understand.
John: And I met a woman the other day who was like chairwoman of the Northwest Goodwills.
John: And I was like, I really love your stores.
John: And she was appreciative.
John: But you could see in her eyes...
John: that the stores were just a small fraction.
John: I totally buy that.
Merlin: I totally buy it.
Merlin: Tip of the iceberg.
John: Yeah.
John: What's really going on at Goodwill is like, oh, you like to come into the stores.
John: How nice.
John: That's very nice.
John: And then there was just that sense where I suddenly felt like I was talking to somebody from Skull and Bones.
John: I was just like, oh, I don't know anything about Goodwill, do I?
John: And she was like, no, not really.
John: But that's great.
John: That's wonderful.
John: Keep coming in.
John: I was like, whoa, geez.
Merlin: Can I ask a question about that?
Merlin: Related?
Merlin: Okay, because here's one that I'm always thinking about.
Merlin: You go out, you check your mail, and there's something in your mailbox, and there's something that vaguely sounds like a charitable group for veterans.
John: Now, are you talking about your email or your mailman?
Merlin: I'm talking about my P mail.
Merlin: We go out and get your actual postal mail and there'll be something in it like a bag and a plastic wrapper imploring you to help someone.
Merlin: So if you have old clothes or there's going to be a big pickup of your old and broken electronics and something, something, it's going to help veterans or people with disabilities.
Merlin: Now, my wife actually does this.
Merlin: I don't feel right about it.
Merlin: I feel like there's something weird going on.
Merlin: I don't understand how they're making money by picking up broken computer monitors.
Merlin: Do you have any idea what these places are and how they're making money and how I'm pretty sure I'm being scammed?
John: So what I have learned, I guess, is that there are secondary and tertiary markets for old junk.
John: There's a whole, like, sub-economy.
John: And...
John: Goodwill not only processes your material and sells it in their stores, but they also now have a very lucrative online business where they take the cream that used to just end up out on the shelves.
John: Yeah.
John: And now they sell it online.
John: But they also sell material that they collect to other organizations.
Right.
John: And now they are collecting material.
John: They're saying, like, no item of clothing is too shite to donate to Goodwill.
Merlin: Because they can weave it into a bath mat.
John: Yes, right.
John: They take all the old garbage fabric.
John: And that goes into some other economy.
John: They send that somewhere or sell it.
John: I've told you, anybody who's spent much time traveling overseas, you're walking down a path, and here comes a little old lady from some village out in the middle of nowhere, and she's wearing a Chicago Bulls t-shirt online.
John: or a Super Bowl t-shirt.
Merlin: An XFL cat.
John: Yeah, or a Super Bowl t-shirt with the name of the team that lost that year.
Merlin: Oh, because they make them and they got to go somewhere.
Merlin: That's your secondary and your tertiary markets.
John: But Value Village is an actual for-profit company that lives in this non-profit space competing against Salvation Army and Goodwill, which are...
John: which are nominally charitable organizations.
John: Valley Village is just making a profit for some people in the boardroom.
Merlin: My goodness, their webpage really makes them sound a little like a charity.
John: Yeah, but they're not.
John: They're just making money.
John: And so all the time, people back up to Valley Village and drop off all their stuff and feel good about it.
John: And I'm not exactly sure if you can deduct that or not, but...
John: But the value village culture, business culture, I'm pretty sure is just like, it's basically the next level of target.
Merlin: See, putting out an old CRT monitor that hasn't worked for years and is broken and legitimately trashed that's actually dangerous to put in a dump.
Merlin: I don't see any way you make money off that unless you put it on a barge and send it to China and have people like children tear it apart with their fingers.
Merlin: I don't understand how you make money from that.
John: And I think that is exactly what happens.
John: It's copper.
John: Right.
John: I mean, there are there are there are whole villages, there are whole provinces in China where it they're just they're just children.
John: That live there, there are no adults.
John: It's a kind of, it's a kind of floor to the fly situation.
John: They're living in a world constructed of old CRT monitors.
John: And, you know, and there's the one kid that has kind of a monocle that he flips down in front of his eye to see.
John: Oh, he checks the quality of the monitor.
John: Checks the quality and there's a kid that wears a top hat.
Merlin: He gives a confident thumbs up and a nod.
John: And then there's a bunch of ragamuffins that are kind of indistinguishable from one another.
John: And then there's like the heroic girl.
John: It's like Mad Max meets Dickens.
John: Meets Dickens.
John: Mad Max meets Dickens.
Merlin: That's how we'll pitch it.
John: I see this franchise going big.
John: Mad Max meets Dickens.
John: And I'm sure that they are harvesting the copper and all the memories.
John: That's what they're really harvesting.
Merlin: They're harvesting copper and memories?
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, you mean getting the data out?
John: Well, and the memories, right?
John: I mean, you don't know how many of your memories are stored in there.
John: This is part of the computer maths that they don't teach.
John: I'm never donating another monitor.
John: That's what I'm saying.
John: I have so many memories in that monitor.
John: Well, not anymore.
John: They're all in China.
John: There's some kiddo wearing a top hat in China that's like sorting through them.
John: Got to pick a pocket or two.
John: And he's going to employ them in the next – well, probably they have neighborhood stick fights over there already.
John: And that's where they started, right?
John: They started in the CRT mines.
Merlin: Oh, is that right?
Merlin: It's the cradle of stick fights.
John: Yeah, well, probably.
Merlin: There's so much going on I don't understand, John.
Merlin: I have so many questions.
John: Well, me too, and particularly when super train technology starts ramping up and all that hard impact plastic that all that stuff is made of can be converted back into cooking oil.
Merlin: Oh, and you can just send people an e-gram and just say, congratulations, you've been acquired.
Merlin: Your Dickensian China village of CRT monitors has just been acquired.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, so I so I feel pretty strongly that that all of this is happening and that, you know, I kind of want to get out ahead of it, not just for me, but for my family.
Merlin: It's everything is getting harder to understand.
Merlin: I mean, to go back to your example of the thrift store, I mean, I don't know if this is true, but my sense was, I think this is probably mostly true, that when I was spending a lot of time in thrift stores in the early to mid 80s, I think it was probably mostly as simple as this.
Merlin: People would die.
Merlin: And their family would collect all of their belongings and drop them off at Goodwill because what are you going to do with all these old tiny shirts?
Merlin: Somebody maybe launders them, maybe, and then puts them on a hanger.
Merlin: It's $2.
Merlin: Shirts are $2.
Merlin: All the shirts are $2.
Merlin: Long-sleeved shirts, $3, whatever.
Merlin: But they're shirts, and they're all from, I'm guessing, from people in the community.
Merlin: Now, my sense is it has not been that way in years.
Merlin: I think those collection centers jet that off to somewhere else.
Merlin: They pluck out some of this stuff here to send to the Kim Gordon people in New York.
Merlin: This other stuff here gets turned into bath mats, but it all gets redistributed.
Merlin: I think there's a lot of trucking involved in the donation business.
John: There is a lot of trucking and a tremendous amount of sorting that I don't fully understand.
John: Like, I always imagine... We need the monocle.
John: They're seeing something we don't see.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Whether that's a garment or a CRT monitor.
John: You cannot possibly have enough people...
John: highly trained that they can – I mean it has to be like a sluice box, right?
John: Seven different increasingly small –
John: uh layers of oh like like like the fineness of a screen in like mining yeah exactly like here's the big screen we're just going to take everything that smells like vomit stops here doesn't mean it can't be used for something that's right but it's but it stops here and we're going to funnel all the vomit stuff over here and then at the next level are all the things that we plug in and they start immediately to smell like smoke
John: And we're going to funnel those over here.
John: And then on the other side of that, all right, now all the clothes at least have been vomit tested and all the electronic stuff at least doesn't catch on fire.
John: So then that goes to another special group.
John: that can look at stuff more closely and say, all right, this doesn't smell like vomit, but it definitely has vomit on it.
John: And so then they feel it.
Merlin: But suckers like you and me, we're looking at size, we're looking at color, we're looking at brand, we're looking at the quality, but we may not be seeing the memories that are literally being mined out of old men's shirts.
John: That's right.
John: And the thing is, by the time that the millions and millions of items are filtered to the level that we can be worried about size and color, think about all of the tons and tons of materials and memories that have been screened.
John: And where did all that stuff go?
John: I mean, onto a barge to CRT town.
John: Or, alternately, to what I imagine is some kind of garment village high up in the Vulcan mountains of Romania, where they are taking all that vomit garment and reweaving it.
Merlin: Also, memories don't weigh a lot.
John: Some.
Merlin: Well, some memories can be pretty heavy.
Merlin: But you take that corpus of data, and that probably goes into some kind of an AI.
John: I don't know if we're at that level yet.
Merlin: I mean, I don't know how we even know if we're at that level yet.
John: I feel like that.
John: I know goodwill does not make any sense.
John: It doesn't make any sense.
John: And I do.
John: I feel like there are there are probably fields and fields and fields like the Plo SD oil fields.
John: But instead of like oil derricks and and like burning pit fires, there are just like the velveteen rabbits with one broken leg of people's memories just sort of limping, hobbling across this plane.
John: Have you ever seen a rabbit with a broken leg?
Merlin: You mean a living one?
John: Yeah, a live rabbit that's injured.
John: Oh, no, that sounds horrible.
John: It's terrible because the thing about a rabbit is... A bunny wants to hop.
John: A bunny wants to hop and also rabbit legs are... That's a big part of a rabbit, the hind legs.
Merlin: You take away the ears and the legs and you basically got a fat rat.
John: Well, yeah, and a rabbit's foot.
John: I mean, do you remember when everybody had a rabbit's foot?
John: It's just what you did.
John: And I wanted one, and I never had one.
John: I think they used to be real feet from rabbits.
John: They were, and my mom didn't want me to have a rabbit's foot.
John: It was something you got at the state fair.
Merlin: No, no, it's got a bad juju feeling to it.
John: Yeah, right, but people had their keychains were rabbit's feet.
John: What is that about?
John: I'm just thinking about that for the first time now.
John: A lucky rabbit's foot was what they were called.
Merlin: I don't know how you test something like that.
Merlin: Now today you get a Dreamweaver.
Merlin: Not a Dreamweaver.
Merlin: What's it called?
Merlin: A Dreamcatcher.
John: No, I don't think you do get a Dreamcatcher.
John: I mean, you know, back then you would get a Pepsi bottle that had been elongated.
John: Oh, sure.
John: You can melt it down.
John: Really long Pepsi bottle.
John: But anyway, but the thing about a rabbit is its foot and its leg is a big part of how big it is.
John: But the rabbit knows when it's fully functioning, the rabbit kind of keeps its feet kind of tucked underneath itself.
John: So when a rabbit is just kind of sitting there, he's just like with his little nose going.
John: You don't realize how...
John: how big his coiled haunches are.
John: But when a rabbit has been injured and one of those legs is askew or dragging, then it's like, oh my God, that's a big part of that rabbit that's not working right now.
John: And that is how I imagine most people's dreams are once they've been removed from...
John: the vomit garments or the CRTs.
Merlin: Once the memories have been liberated from clothing or context, they're like a limp rabbit.
John: They're like a wounded rabbit, and they're just wandering around a baked plain that smells like oil derries.
Merlin: And maybe they're just hanging on to those because they know it's going to be used for something they're not sure yet.
John: They haven't built the AI yet, and they don't want to get rid of all these rabbits until they have fully mined.
John: The market's not ready for that.
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: that's a different screenplay much worse screenplay yeah i'm sure thinking about it though i'm thinking about it i'm yeah yeah you know what i gotta quit thinking about the secondhand market it's uh it's too strange and then like you got the whole recycling thing that's not to beat the recycling thing to death but like i've read a couple things lately that make me think that recycling is not as simple to understand as we've been led to believe i don't think it is at all
Merlin: I think it's basically garbage plus.
Merlin: I think it's like a premium garbage where the way I understand it is like, you know, like you go to the airport or you go to the food court or you go to wherever.
Merlin: And now there's like three, four, five different barrels.
Merlin: They're all labeled differently.
Merlin: It's all incredible.
Merlin: I saw one the other day where it was food only plastic bottles and trash.
Merlin: And I was like, whatever happened to compostable cups?
Merlin: Like, that's really weird.
Merlin: But, you know, sometimes at the airport, it'll say right there, put all your junk in here.
Merlin: We'll go sort it off site.
Merlin: Trust me.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: And so, I don't know.
Merlin: I want to be a gamer about it.
Merlin: But, you know, the thing is, like, apparently, it turns out, there's not always a market that benefits, say, saving green bottles.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Have you heard this?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Go on.
Merlin: Well, what I've heard, I don't know if this is true, but I mean, I think there's, I don't know, but there are some things that are kind of perennial.
Merlin: Like there's an increasingly small amount of money you can get for, for example, like cans.
Merlin: I think the way they make money from cans mostly is the deposit in a place like San Francisco.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Ditto for bottles.
Merlin: But supposedly, I mean, it's not like they're cleaning those bottles and reusing them.
Merlin: They're not like Coke bottles.
Merlin: Not anymore.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And so, but the story goes, and you can tell me if you've heard the same thing, you now have, you know, entrees into the corridors of power.
Merlin: It's my understanding that maybe this month, eh, you know what?
Merlin: It's actually, there's not enough money for us to transport all these green bottles, so we'll take them to the dump.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: I don't know if that's true, but that's what I hear.
Merlin: I think all the money is in scale and arbitrage, like so many things in life.
John: So when I reflect on the way that I use my own recycling, compost, and garbage bins, which now Seattle has extended to recycling...
John: Compost.
John: And landfill.
John: Garbage.
John: Well, we just introduced a new.
John: You got four?
John: Yeah, we got four now.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And like mandated.
John: If you put food and food waste in the garbage now, it's against the law.
Merlin: They – I get frustrated sometimes with our neighbors.
Merlin: Well, they've gotten better.
Merlin: But the previous person who lived there and has since moved out, I think she took a certain amount of joy and willfully – I hate to say this.
Merlin: I think she was deliberately pushing my buttons.
Merlin: Because she would take – you know the kind of thing you buy like a computer and it's got a sandwich of styrofoam?
Merlin: You got like two styrofoam pieces?
Merlin: She would go in and just stuff two giant pieces of styrofoam into the compost like that was a thing.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Now, what she doesn't know or doesn't care about is, like, I use the compost.
Merlin: Like, we compost a lot.
Merlin: And we recycle a lot.
Merlin: And here's the thing.
Merlin: The guy with the mustache that empties our trash or, you know, puts all of our different buckets into his truck on Tuesday mornings, he's watching.
John: Oh, he is.
Merlin: Brother, he's watching.
Merlin: Because, you know what?
Merlin: I think he gets dinged.
Merlin: if a bunch of plastic goes into the compost.
Merlin: Oh, it's on him!
Merlin: I think he's going to get notes if he doesn't get it right.
Merlin: So then he just puts it down, you know, new dealer, and then he puts a passive-aggressive sign on there that says, I checked off what I'm not taking because you did it.
Merlin: Now I'm stuck with styrofoam in the compost for a week.
John: So this is the thing.
John: When I think about my own relationship to all these bins, I realize that I am presuming that on the other end...
John: there is someone with a master's degree who understands my intention
John: and hand sorts each thing that I send their way with the same care and thought that I have put into which bin to put them in and how to arrange them.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: It's almost a kind of refuse correspondence.
John: Yeah, exactly, because it's like there's some rule where lids go in the garbage unless a lid is eight inches or six inches across, and then those lids go in...
John: the recycling.
Merlin: Well, you mean like a Folgers coffee lid?
John: Yeah, like a lid from a jar.
John: So if your lid, it's basically like halibut fishing.
John: I've never heard this.
John: Yeah, if your lid is under six inches, you have to throw it away.
John: Throw it back.
John: But if your lid is over six inches, then it's in a special category of lids that go to a... And I imagine at the recycling plant, the lids go by and there's someone there paid...
John: you know, with a, again, with a, like a jeweler's loop and a, and a, and a yardstick that's grabbing lids off the conveyor belt.
John: And it's like, the lids are mine.
John: I'm the lid, the lid person.
John: And they are, they have a separate kind of, and they're sorting lids and they have plans for all the lids.
John: And they, because the thing is, it's not by, it's not by composition, right?
John: A plastic lid that's over six inches and a metal lid that's over six inches, both fulfilled the six inch rule, but they are made of completely different stuff.
John: And so as far as I read the instructions, both of those lids are recyclable, whereas a four-inch lid that's made of aluminum and a four-inch lid that's made of plastic both go in the garbage.
John: And so when I picture the recycling center, I think of it as a miraculous place.
John: It literally is where the idea of Supertrain came from.
John: This temple where hundreds of trained people are going through our garbage and turning that garbage into the diamonds of remade, repurposed basic materials.
John: But but but as you as you say and as I think about it now, of course, that's not happening.
John: It's all just going into the it's all going into a freight car and just being dumped in the ocean.
Merlin: Because the truth is, if this whole process is not confusing.
Merlin: The more confusing this process is, the more likely it is they're actually doing something with any of the stuff.
Merlin: This one's for clear bottles.
Merlin: This one's for green bottles.
Merlin: This one's for brown bottles.
Merlin: I'm sure the technology's changed, or I imagine it has.
Merlin: But back then, if you wanted to go get that stuff recycled, you had to do all the sorting yourself.
Merlin: That was just pure acceptance at that place, but you had to bring in the right stuff.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: The lid thing is perplexing to me, because what do they do with plastic to recycle it?
John: Do they melt it?
John: I keep thinking that that's what happens, that they melt it down and get it back to its pure essence, which is – and then they make dinosaurs out of it.
John: Like playground equipment.
John: Yeah, right.
John: They make our nation's highways.
John: Something's not right.
John: Something feels weird about this.
John: And this is why I feel like the next technology – and if I were Elon Musk –
John: I would stand, boy, if I were Elon Musk, boy, where would we start?
John: But one of the things I would be building, I would stop building a space plane.
John: I think that the space plane thing, like every billionaire's got his space program right now.
John: And no billionaire, it seems to me, is working on cool public transit.
John: And I think what we need are billionaires that are working on public transit and affordable housing and a solution to the homeless problem and fewer billionaires that are working on space programs.
John: Like one or two billionaire-driven space programs, I feel like we're covered in that area.
John: But the fact that there's not a single billionaire that's working on like –
John: shelters for homeless families feels like there's an imbalance but if i were elon musk i would be working on a counter we i really feel like this is this is first principles of roderick on the line yeah like a countertop recycling thing that's about this it's maybe bigger than a soda stream
John: smaller than a pony keg.
Merlin: And it's the opposite of a 3D printer.
Merlin: Everybody wants to do 3D printing now.
Merlin: Oh, look at that.
Merlin: You can be a gun or a keychain.
Merlin: We're saying the opposite of that.
Merlin: We're saying take what's already there and make it go away.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's a 3D unprinter.
John: You put anything, literally anything in the slot, anything that will fit in the slot, you put in the slot.
John: The machine analyzes its composition and then goes about whatever process it requires to either melt the metal or,
John: or the hydrofluorochlorocarbons or the chlorofluorohorocarbons.
John: Could you pour cooking oil in there?
John: Absolutely.
John: Well, why would you?
John: Because that's what you're trying to get out of it.
Merlin: Because I don't drink coffee.
Merlin: I don't drink canned coffee.
Merlin: When I was a kid, you'd always pour your grease into a Folgers can.
Merlin: My wife wouldn't allow that into the house because she's fancy.
Merlin: What do you do with your grease?
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: It becomes like a rabbit hutch.
Merlin: Like, we have to wait for it to cool off a little bit, and then you put it.
Merlin: My wife will cut the top off of a seltzer can and pour it into there like an animal.
Merlin: And then what does she do?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: She waits for me to throw it away.
Merlin: But in this case, you're saying maybe, if I understand, if this gets to the right level of sophistication, it's somewhere between the opposite of a 3D printer and a microwave.
Merlin: And let's be honest, the disposal.
Merlin: But, like, you could put grease in there because that could be running somebody's car in your neighborhood because there's a local collection center that decides what to do with it based on neighborhood allocations.
John: Well, so ultimately, yeah, right.
John: At the end of the week, you'd have a little brick of carbon or probably a big brick of carbon.
John: You'd have a little brick of silver, a little brick of platinum, a little brick of plutonium, a little brick of – a very small brick of plutonium.
John: You'd have a jar of cooking oil.
John: You'd have a jar of motor oil.
John: And then you could either sell those on the market or you could plug them into your 3D printers.
John: where you would then use all those materials, again, to build your own, you know, garter belts or whatever it was.
John: Like an on-demand garter belt.
John: Yeah, because what are the building blocks of things?
John: Oil.
Oil.
John: Right.
John: Carbon value.
John: Yeah.
John: Nursing.
John: Right.
John: Family.
John: Family.
John: That's right.
John: Love.
John: Love.
John: Love.
John: Love is always the missing ingredient.
John: Right.
John: And so you so you just you think you look over here, you're like, here are the things I need this week.
John: And I need the following materials to make those things.
John: And then here are the things I'm throwing away this week.
John: And these are the component elements of those.
Merlin: See, I like the idea of the neighborhood thing, though, where almost like you – like right now, we think nothing about having a place in Florida where all the water drains off into a pond.
Merlin: Like what if there's also a way that all the resources of your small neighborhood, your block, could be reallocated on an on-demand basis?
Merlin: So you're talking about a take a penny, leave a penny –
Merlin: Take a penny, leave a penny.
Merlin: If you need an on-demand aluminum garter belt, that could be delivered because you've got this guy over here who's drinking all the Coors Light.
Merlin: Maybe you've got an automobile that can run on French fries, and that could be sluiced out of this guy over here who plays a lot of online games.
John: Right.
John: So the Coors Light guy is like, oh, what am I going to do with all these cans?
John: And two doors down, there's somebody that's like, where am I going to get the aluminum to build my space program?
Merlin: It's like an ongoing existential swap meet.
Merlin: Leave a penny, take a penny.
Merlin: Leave a penny, take a penny.
Merlin: And I think it's important because a lot of people say take a penny, leave a penny.
Merlin: I say leave a penny, take a penny.
John: You say leave a penny, take a penny.
Merlin: It starts with leaving a penny.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: You know, here's another thing.
Merlin: How hard is this going to be to build?
Merlin: I feel like Elon Musk should be thinking about this.
Merlin: By comparison, not difficult.
Merlin: It's going to take some resources.
Merlin: It's going to take some time.
Merlin: It's going to take some adjustment.
Merlin: It's going to take some retrofitting.
Merlin: But people are always doing stuff like getting new windows or air conditioning.
Merlin: Like how hard it'd be.
Merlin: You get a two-way sluice, and maybe that could be a 3D printer, too.
John: Yeah, so people are always coming up to me at Comic-Cons and such and saying, when is Super Train coming?
John: And I'm like, you know what?
John: I'm starting to say to people, like...
John: Make your own Super Train.
John: Yes.
John: Right?
John: When is Super Train coming?
John: What about now?
John: Super Train starts at home.
Merlin: Super Train is like a last minute party.
Merlin: The thing is, it's a last minute party in the sense that it's going to be as good as what everybody brings.
Merlin: So if you show up at the last minute party and you're like, this is lame.
Merlin: It's like, fuck you.
Merlin: Go out and buy some ice.
Merlin: Bring something to the party.
John: You're saying Super Train is stone soup?
Merlin: No, I'm not.
Merlin: Here's one thing I've been thinking about, and I don't want to get too serious, but I have been thinking about this a little bit.
Merlin: When I read what you say in your campaign and hear what you say in your campaign, and we had that conversation probably now a couple months ago about stuff like, I mean, I'll put this in my words, and then you tell me if it's even near right, but like, okay, there's stuff coming right now.
Merlin: We are on the verge of a lot of technology going from hmm to like, wow, we don't know what that's going to be, but what are the smart things we could do to start preparing the way for
Merlin: for what could come along.
Merlin: And the example I gave, I think, was having to deal with, like, we're not sure.
Merlin: Here's what we know.
Merlin: What we know is that we kind of want to use less oil and have less people driving a single gas-guzzling car around.
Merlin: We've reached peak that shit.
Merlin: Like, now what is next?
Merlin: Is it self-driving cars?
Merlin: Maybe.
Merlin: Is it public transit?
Merlin: Maybe.
Merlin: But like you said, every sidewalk you put down will be torn up someday.
Merlin: Like, how do you make that easy to deal with in the future?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So I've been trying to think more about like what does that mean in like one to five – is it something that you can do in one to five-year terms?
Merlin: How do you start making fewer dumb decisions and more scalable, rollbackable, fixable decisions?
John: Yeah, and in particular, it's really hard –
John: especially when you're campaigning for office, but really hard in general to see yourself, and we talk about this all the time, but to see yourself or to see ourselves as in the middle of the stream, between hither and thither.
John: And so everybody wants a solution based on
John: where we are right now because it seems like this is always the end of history.
John: And to be running for office and advocating in some respects for like, hey, what we should do right now, I mean, what we should have done in Seattle was build a transit network 40 years ago.
John: We didn't do it, and we should have built it 20 years ago, and we didn't do it.
John: And we should have even built it 10 years ago, and we didn't.
John: But now we're at a place where,
John: Everywhere you look, there's a new transportation technology about to come online.
John: I mean really in every aspect.
Merlin: I mean off the top of my head, you have the self-driving cars, which is something that one or two years ago I looked at and went, are you even kidding me?
Merlin: And now I can't believe we're not doing it.
Merlin: I mean just the data on how much better decisions something like that could make.
Merlin: You've got stuff like drones.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: You've got – not necessarily the kind that kill people in other countries, but you've got smaller kind of personal-sized remote-controllable aircraft, heavily unregulated.
Merlin: What are some of the other things?
Merlin: You've got changes in what you can do with electric.
Merlin: The ability to store electricity has vastly changed in the last five years.
John: And that's ultimately the whole game because five years ago, it was like electric cars, what, if you want to drive 10 miles?
John: Yeah.
John: And now it's like, no, electric-powered things already work.
John: 99% of the trips that we take would already be electric-powered.
John: And so you have all these other things that electricity can do, like all those weird bicycles that people used to retrofit little motors to.
John: We're very quickly going to see bicycles that are electric-powered
John: augmented powered uphills so you ride your bike you're having fun on your bike and then you come to a big hill and you engage
John: an electric motor that runs you up the hill.
John: And it's not, you know, that technology exists now, but it makes bikes really heavy and awkward and, you know, and it's just going to be, it's going to be kind of seamlessly integrated.
John: And all the people running around town on Segways that we look at and mock and say like, oh my God, look at you with this, you know, on your silly ass Segway.
John: Like really that was a technology that was,
John: 10 or 15 years ahead of its time but all the different permutations of that the kind of personal mobility scooter platform skateboard as the batteries get better and motors get more efficient and all that stuff gets better there are going to be incredible innovations in terms of people just like hopping on a little platform and it whisks them
John: to here and to there, uh, that all is happening.
John: But then there's also all these advances in rail that are, I mean, you know, the big excitement of this train that people keep saying they're going to build and then not building, uh, the, the, you know, the vacuum tube train or the maglev train from San Francisco to, to Los Angeles, the technology actually is there.
John: It's just, how do you get the political will and the money to build a
John: This link.
John: Right.
John: But you could build it and have a train that goes from L.A.
John: to San Francisco in what, an hour?
Merlin: That would be so amazing.
John: And so it's so it's a question of like, all right, here we are.
John: We're at the technological level.
John: And is that the direction that we're going?
John: Are we going to build that or are we not?
John: Are these little scooters that I'm imagining and little skateboards and little electric-powered kind of mobility devices, what direction are those going to take?
John: I can see it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's where people... I mean, you definitely know that if Tony Hawk can invest in an electric skateboard that goes up hills...
John: that still functions as a skateboard for a while at least, that's going to happen.
John: And so from the standpoint of like we need to make a huge investment in transportation, it's really unusual and weird to be in a position to say like what we actually should probably do right now is put our finger in the dike
John: Make the short-term investments to keep stuff running so that we don't really screw up this transition.
John: And then everybody put their heads together and try and start seeing what is the future really going to look like.
John: Because I know at Uber, I know up in the boardroom at Uber, those guys when they're not playing Nerf basketball and sexually harassing one another, they are imagining in the very near term a world where there are no drivers and
John: and where Uber is in control of a vast network of, of centrally controlled autonomous vehicles.
John: And we all pull out our phones and Uber becomes synonymous with transportation.
John: And we pull out our phone and the car whisks up.
John: We get in it.
John: It takes us where we're going.
John: It, it, it subtracts a certain amount of Bitcoins from our, uh,
John: you know from our online account we never even think about it it's not even a thing that you have to it's not a transaction you have to do it's all just happening you don't pull out your phone you just say out loud to your google glass i need a car and there's one there in two seconds and it's run by uber that's absolutely what they are imagining they don't want drivers they want to eliminate drivers and they will and for most of us consumers
John: we're going to be like, this is great.
John: I just walk over and say I need a car and one appears and it takes me there and I don't have to talk to anybody and I don't have to do a transaction.
John: It's just another eel that's sucking on me and at the end of the month my bill gets paid automatically and I'm just working for the company store or whatever.
John: But how do cities plan for that and how do cities say like, well, wait a minute, we don't want Uber to be the
John: We don't want them controlling that infrastructure.
John: But they are working hard to build it.
John: If we don't want them to do it, we would have to get involved.
John: We would have to envision it and do it ourselves or regulate it.
Merlin: And the results are – I mean with Uber in particular, the results are so –
Merlin: The results are so immediate and the results have such a high positive impact on influential people with money.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I don't mean to make this overly political, but I saw a blog post or an article the other day where the nut of it, the nut is basically it's difficult.
Merlin: It's difficult to be punctual when you're poor.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like how hard it is, just how much more friction there is to everything.
Merlin: If like the more you have your own control over your time and in this case your transportation, like the more options for convenience and punctuality that you have.
Merlin: I mean you can get there early and get a coffee unless you're getting two buses that may or may not have time transfers and stuff like that.
John: Right.
Merlin: Well, unless you have to figure out who's going to watch your kids.
Right.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: At some point it starts out being completely bananas and maybe even proprietary.
Merlin: And then eventually it becomes adopted.
Merlin: And then at some point it becomes, you know, wasteful or obviated, inefficient, out of the times.
Merlin: But, you know, I'm thinking about stuff along the lines of railroads.
Merlin: And then the gauge of tracks, right?
Merlin: Like at some point – I don't know.
Merlin: I'm sure you know way more about this than I did.
Merlin: But at some point, in order to have railroads where everybody's cars could go everywhere, we had to agree on a certain gauge of track.
Merlin: In order to have rifles where you could have replaceable parts and have an assembly line, you had to standardize things like what those parts are and the level of quality in each of those things.
Merlin: Shit.
Merlin: I mean, look at the bricks in a building.
Merlin: Like, what if half the bricks broke or like half the bricks were an eighth of an inch bigger on one side or whatever?
Merlin: There has to be some way of standardizing whose Lego set we're going to use for this.
Merlin: I can go to any place in America that has electric plugs and plug in a 110, you know, device and it'll just work.
Merlin: Unless something's very, very wrong.
Merlin: It seems like that's the part that's the trickiest.
Merlin: It isn't that we need another billionaire to figure out what to build with the existing Lego sets.
Merlin: We need somebody who can create open Lego sets that will let new kinds of flexibility emerge.
Merlin: And I literally cannot think of a better analogy than that.
Merlin: But whatever ends up happening with roads, it can't be something that just caters to the people who've moved to town in the last three years and have a nice car that they like to drive.
Merlin: That doesn't feel like the future.
Merlin: That feels like the past.
John: Right.
John: Well, and this is where, like the other day I was driving along and a minivan drove by me and it was an Apple Maps minivan.
John: And Apple Maps is now finally sort of getting around to the three-dimensional mapping, the three-dimensional photographic mapping of the world that Google's been doing for a long time.
John: And it...
John: It rattled me because I remember the moment in my own life where Apple decided that in their relationship with Google, because you remember the original iPhones all had Google Maps.
John: Absolutely.
John: And then Google decided that they weren't sharing all the metadata they were collecting with Apple.
John: And Google was like, no, no, no.
John: All that metadata is our proprietary stuff.
John: Well, there was a time when the head guy at Google was on the board at Apple.
John: Right, and those were heady days.
John: But then Apple decided, from a business standpoint, it made more sense for them to build their own mapping program from the ground up rather than...
John: Just seed to Google all of the data that Google was collecting about where people went and what it was tied to.
John: And so what that meant for us, the consumers, was that all of a sudden our iPhones no longer had Google Maps functionality.
John: And we were now...
John: all millions of beta testers for apple's garbage map program that it took them six years to get to the point where now it only directs me to the wrong address one out of seven let me ask you just real quick side note real talk you've you've been you've had bad experiences with apple maps like like demonstrably bad that was flatly wrong experiences with apple maps
John: Yep, where somebody says, hey, come to – here's the event and here's the address.
John: And I click on the address and Apple loads their map program and puts a pin somewhere.
John: And I go to that pin and it is completely on the other side of the world.
Merlin: So interesting.
Merlin: I've had a handful of bad experiences.
Merlin: But the reason I ask is because I –
Merlin: I have to say that of all of the things, like all the Apple scandals and pseudo scandals over the years, the antenna gate and stuff like that amongst normal people, like in my family, people in my family who are still five within the last three to five years, users of Apple products, that is the one thing that pretty much everybody seems to agree on is that the maps, the maps were total shit and now they're mostly shit and they would, they actually will go and get and use Google maps on their phone.
John: Yeah, I mean, I had to because I showed up a half hour late to important appointments.
John: Right.
Merlin: I remember that recent one where you were supposed, as a candidate, you were going to appear somewhere and it sent you to the totally wrong place.
John: Yeah, it was my first meeting with the Chamber of Commerce.
John: And I roll in 45 minutes late, drenched in sweat, apologizing to him.
John: And I'm like, listen, I'm a serious candidate.
John: I'm not just a goofy musician that doesn't know how to find his way to a building in the center of town.
John: My phone misled me.
John: I've lived here my whole life.
John: Yeah.
John: My phone told me that your office was on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill in a flop house rather than in the Rainier Tower.
John: But thanks, Apple.
John: I didn't mean to derail you, but that's an example, yeah.
John: And what that ultimately is, it's beta versus VHS.
John: And where we are right now is Apple and Facebook and Uber and presumably all the big three car companies, although they're really lagging in this.
John: But all the tech companies recognize that the self-driving car and the point of it isn't the car.
John: The point of it is that once all cars are...
John: connected to one another in a grid of central control then there are no more accidents and then it's then the efficiency of transportation everything just goes fast and it's connected to the the the fundamental premise of why google maps i mean why google was collecting that information in the first place if you know where people are where they're going and
John: and what their history of going places is.
John: You have massive knowledge about them.
John: And not only that, but you also are charging them to move you around.
John: It's an incredible system of knowledge and control.
John: And every one of those companies is trying to envision that future and build that system together.
Merlin: And when they roll it out – But to use my analogy, they want it to be their Lego set.
John: They want it to be their Lego set.
John: And when they roll it out from the consumer standpoint, it's just going to be like, hey, I need a car.
John: Zoop.
John: Oh, this is great.
John: The future is amazing.
John: And we've already acquiesced to these companies knowing –
John: you know, geolocating our photographs and connecting it all to everything, you know, to our Amazon accounts and everything they know about us.
John: Everybody's just completely rolled over on that privacy stuff that we were so terrified about 15 years ago because of the convenience and the fact that, oh, it's fine.
John: You know, when I go onto Amazon, it just knows what I want.
John: And when that is true of transportation also,
John: I mean, there's a lot to philosophize about it.
John: Right.
John: But from the standpoint of a city and the way a city runs, you know, what's amazing to me is that I've gone in and sat in the boardroom of the Teamsters Union here several times and talked to several different groups of Teamsters.
John: And in the short term, they're very interested in unionizing Uber drivers and – because drivers are – that's what the Teamsters are.
John: They must see that as a stopgap though.
John: Well, but that's not a thing that they want to talk about.
John: They do not want to talk about the fact that all of the technology groups right now are all working furiously to eliminate drivers, to eliminate all kinds of drivers, and that millions of jobs will disappear.
John: Truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, drivers.
John: I mean, it's a major job for middle class people.
Right.
John: It's all going away.
John: And Teamsters don't want to talk about it, and they don't want to think about it right now.
John: They want to unionize Uber drivers.
John: They want to get out ahead of what is the short-term problem, which is taxi drivers are unionized, but Uber drivers aren't.
John: But the near-term problem, which isn't even that far out, which is all y'all's jobs are going away,
John: to be replaced by a, you know, a massive overarching grid.
John: And that is undeniably the future in our lifetimes.
John: And we're not talking about who controls it or, or how it integrates.
John: And as far as I can tell right now, there's like all these companies are furiously beavering away because nobody wants to be the Betamax.
Merlin: Oh, so they end up being kind of like the early railroad barons who saw the benefits of having lines that only their cars could go on.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So what do you do?
Merlin: I mean, I'm getting that wrong.
Merlin: But I mean, rather than having a policy that pushes this forward, they're kind of forcing the hand of all these different groups and making better progress very quickly on all the stuff they want to have happen.
Merlin: Who are you talking about now?
Merlin: Oh, in the case of somebody like Uber.
Merlin: I mean, you know, let me put it this way.
Merlin: I have beyond mixed feelings about Uber.
Merlin: You know where I live.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: There's a lot of nights...
Merlin: And days where I just don't get a cab.
Merlin: And I've tried for years because that's what there was.
Merlin: And so, I mean, I have to admit that, you know, I don't love Uber, but it's driven me nuts for years that like on – we've hired a babysitter.
Merlin: It's date night.
Merlin: It's one of our three date nights a year.
Merlin: And literally in over three hours, we cannot get a cab.
Merlin: You keep calling, you keep calling.
Merlin: They're getting mad because you keep calling.
Merlin: But the thing is, every single person, that dispatcher is sending them a message that says, go way the hell out into the western part of town where you won't probably even get a fare back.
Merlin: If they see one person on the street, on Polk Street, they're going to pick that person up before they even make it to the panhandle.
Merlin: So, I mean, the part of my frustration is, like, I hate using Uber, but, like, there's not that much better stuff.
Merlin: You've got to be somewhere on time.
Merlin: But I hate what they're doing, and I can't believe what they get away with.
John: And in the short term, like as a politician, I have to be confronting Uber right now and the fact that, yeah, they're a better service in a lot of ways.
John: And the cab companies are playing catch up and they're mad and Uber is not regulated the same way the cab companies are and that's unfair and Uber drivers are treated unfairly.
John: badly relative to other professional drivers, and that has to be regulated and changed.
Merlin: I mean, this is setting aside all the safety stuff and the privacy stuff that they've been horrible about, too.
John: Yeah, and this is all, as an aspiring politician, this is all stuff that's right on the table in front of us that we have to deal with in the next year or two.
John: But Uber...
John: Uber corporate is not playing the short game.
John: They don't care.
John: They're just trying to keep us all off balance until they can eliminate drivers completely.
John: And so we're down here fighting over bread scraps, and the big technology companies are...
John: are way, way out ahead of this.
John: And they are not worried about, you know, they're not worried about the unions and they're not worried about this kind of regulation because they are planning to roll out this massive other thing.
John: And the big question is going to be in 10 years,
John: When you walk down and you have an Apple product on your person and that Apple product is your gateway, your chip is Apple branded rather than Google branded.
John: and you want a car, are you going to have access to every car or just the Apple branded cars?
Merlin: Not so different from music in some ways.
Merlin: Like if the stuff you want to listen to is not on your streaming service, you're not going to hear it.
John: And that should give us pause because that is how these companies have chosen to
John: to handle the world of music or the world of movies or a lot of the other services that we want.
John: Like we, we have the absolutely the technology right now to watch any movie ever and any TV show ever, but we can't because the, because the apertures are controlled by these different companies and they have different rules and they, you know, and so, so we, there is one possible future where you walk out there and whatever, whatever the brand on the chip is,
John: that's your portal is, it doesn't matter because it's... Are you familiar with the idea of common carrier?
John: So the railroads, for instance, are what's known as common carriers, which means that they have to carry...
John: whatever people want to move around.
John: The railroads are private companies but
John: But the railroad can't say, like, well, we're not going to carry that boxcar full of stuff because we don't believe in a woman's right to choose and that boxcar has birth control in it.
John: Right?
John: So the railroad, if you're a business and you need stuff moved around, the railroads can't pick and choose within, you know,
John: within pretty general guidelines they have this is why this is why when when environmentalists go to burlington northern and say stop carrying those oil trains like burlington northern can't choose to do that or or maybe to put a sharper point on it you couldn't say we refuse to carry replacement parts for our competitors trains right that's i mean it's a kind of specific antitrusty kind of aspect of this right
John: Yeah, they have to kind of move freight around.
John: That's part of their public trust.
John: And ultimately, and this is the thing we've seen with cab companies over the decades, right?
John: Cab companies routinely did not pull over and pick up people of color who were hailing cabs.
John: And that was a big thing.
John: That continues to be a problem, but it was a major, major problem.
John: And it violates the law.
John: But when all of this is done by bleeps and bloops, right?
John: Like, let's say Uber... I mean, because Uber drivers rate their passengers too, right?
John: Yeah.
John: So let's say that you have a bad rating and all transportation... And basically, we go into this world where you...
John: Where it's autonomous cars everywhere and you can't get a car?
Merlin: But also it could be something even more subtle than that, right?
Merlin: Where it could be something where it's like – it isn't simply just that we – there's not a particular reason, but there is an aggregate to the algorithm of deciding who's the most efficient person over time and best person to pick up.
Merlin: Like this is a common user.
Merlin: This is a VIP.
Merlin: This is somebody who has a high rating.
Merlin: Let's look at the most obvious one.
Merlin: This is somebody who's leaving a high traffic area to go to another high traffic area.
Merlin: That's very desirable for anybody who drives.
John: It's more efficient.
John: So that stuff – so as we look at the future of transportation and we think, well, a lot of our transportation systems are going to get replaced, supplanted by this private infrastructure that's being privately developed and is going to roll out on the terms of these private companies, we're in a way –
John: We potentially are entering into a new realm where transportation is privileged.
John: And all of the potential of it, which is like true mobility for people, true equitable mobility provided by this amazing technology of on-demand cars, we squander everything.
John: because we let it be rolled out on a for-profit basis based on these pre-existing, like, what's your, you know, do you have a five-star rating?
Merlin: It becomes almost like a credit score.
Merlin: It's in like a new form of redlining in some ways.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And you're standing there trying to get a car in the rain, and they're just going by you, going by you, because they're off to pick up VIP customers, and you're waiting for the, you know, the ramshackle,
John: you're waiting for the Intel car or whatever.
John: You're waiting for the car that's branded by Chick-fil-A.
John: to come get you because it's the only one that will accept uncredited, one-star pass.
John: It's like the Chinatown bus.
Merlin: You go to this quarter of last resort that's really consistent in its way but is not the most convenient thing.
John: So that's terrifying to me, and that is a thing that I feel like only cities, only municipalities, only governments...
John: can intervene and say, no, we are going to control this grid, we are going to control this system, this is a public utility, not a private enterprise, because it has to serve the public good, and that is more important than rewarding investors, early investors, because what we can see now is that this is inevitable, this is
John: our transportation future and transportation is a public good and not it's one thing to sell cars into a thing but private companies don't own the roads and that's what ultimately our future is going to look like they're going to say like oh yeah we'll pay for the roads with taxes but the actual transportation system is going to be privately owned by these tech companies in competition with each other
John: And so cities have to get ahead of it and they aren't.
John: No one is talking about it.
John: And we're all arguing about whether or not to unionize Uber drivers and we're arguing about whether to put more express buses on the road.
John: And it's like, you guys, we have to be smarter than this.
Merlin: But now I'm thinking, I guess, and I'm merely playing devil's advocate, but I'm thinking about the position of the pharmaceutical industry who, you know, well, you know, they're in the business of trying to provide pharmaceuticals that help people have better health.
Merlin: But in the interest of doing that, they get things like a patent where they and only they can produce this allergy pill for whatever it is, 10 years.
Merlin: And then you say, okay, well, now we're going to slightly change the capsule on this with a different delivery mechanism, and maybe we eke another 10 years out of that.
Merlin: Eventually, that goes to generics.
Merlin: Now, their case is going to be that there's a huge amount of R&D in that.
Merlin: There's a huge amount of testing.
Merlin: There's just a ridiculous amount of development.
Merlin: So, you know, do we set aside the argument that in that case they feel like that innovation is what enables them to make those things?
Merlin: Do we take into account how much of that is to make your Peter hard versus how much it is to really help people with diabetes?
Merlin: Like, where are the lines in deciding what, at a municipal level, where you're deciding what private interests can do in a common carrier kind of environment?
John: I mean, I think there are a lot of cases to be made that the pharmaceutical industry
John: like a lot of our medical practice is deeply broken and the, and the capitalism that is rife in it, like it not only gives us poorer outcomes, our, our medicine is worse, our treatment is worse.
John: Um, the, the time factor is, you know, is, uh, is extended by decades and,
John: Like you could make that case and we should be making that case.
John: But I think that transportation is in a very different realm than medicine just in the sense that like pharmaceutical – I mean there is a huge difference between boner pills and heart medicine.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, but the thing – part of Uber's success I think has come out of the fact that – maybe just to repeat myself, that they were a product that people didn't even know how much they wanted, people who could afford it.
Merlin: And it makes – it must make it harder to regulate them since they are so over-servicing the people who are in a position of power to decide what's going to happen with it.
Merlin: Isn't that part of the struggle?
John: Yeah, well, and also it's – I mean the big part of the struggle is how do you get –
John: How do you get governments to have this kind of elasticity and smartness?
John: But I think a better comparison is that when electricity was first invented, there were probably 10 different people.
John: trying to string up independent electric utilities in San Francisco.
John: I mean, there was Edison and Tesla arguing about whether or not it should be AC or DC.
Merlin: Look what it does to an elephant.
John: That's right.
John: Look what it does to an elephant.
John: There was a lot of private enterprise and there was a lot of that argument of like, well, this was expensive and this is our proprietary knowledge.
John: But at a certain point, cities realized that providing electrical service was a common good
John: And that it couldn't be, we couldn't have 10 different electrical networks.
John: We needed one.
John: And, you know, originally there were a lot of different people bringing water to the city.
John: And then we had to make that a utility.
John: So there's plenty of, there are plenty of models where you see where something transitions from a competitive environment.
John: And this is why, this is the argument for municipal broadband.
John: That at a certain point, high-speed Internet service passes beyond a threshold where it's a luxury and it becomes a necessity.
John: and at the point at which it becomes a necessity, then cities need to step in and make sure... Because right now, in Seattle, for instance, Comcast provides much better, much faster, and more reliable internet service to the rich neighborhoods than to the poor neighborhoods.
John: And...
John: Uh, and you yell at them about it and they go, Oh, we definitely are upgrading as we go and all this stuff, but they're not because they have no incentive to.
John: Right.
John: Um, and so what you see is more and more of our life is going online and those companies exhibit less and less of a, and, and, and, you know, and the, the, uh, the, uh,
John: Libertarian argument is like, why should they provide a public service?
John: They're a for-profit company.
John: And when you come up against that attitude in a thing that becomes a necessity, then you say like, well, then we're going to take that away from you.
John: No one – no business has an intrinsic right to the airwaves or really an intrinsic right to anything.
John: That's – that's just a – that is just another argument, right?
John: It's just –
John: Capitalism isn't nature any more than anything else.
John: And so, I mean, my argument in Seattle is we need a municipal broadband.
John: The city should supply internet service the same way it supplies electricity and water.
John: Because internet service is becoming equivalent to those things in terms of...
John: That it needs to be equally provided to everybody.
Merlin: Which sounds a little dramatic until you really think about it.
Merlin: But if you think about it in the case of Comcast, you can see those graphs on how – I don't know if it's – I think it might be revenue.
Merlin: I don't know if it's subscribers.
Merlin: But basically in this past month, the number of Comcast cable – I think the cable revenue, cable TV revenue has now been equaled by the broadband revenue.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So do you want to be – in our case, like you can have Comcast or you can use your phone basically.
Merlin: It's Comcast.
Merlin: That's really all there is in my neighborhood period.
Merlin: So I mean do we want to be subject to the whims of that – a company who's going to be affected on a national level by different kinds of disruptions in service?
Merlin: Like would you want your local electricity?
Merlin: To, you know, be insensitive to what's happening in all these other places that might end.
Merlin: If the company is running it suddenly has a terrible time in the Northeast.
Merlin: So now your service goes bad or something like that.
Merlin: I mean, you want to sort of like firewall that service that is now it's become so much more than just a fun way to poke people on Facebook.
Merlin: It's how people conduct their business.
John: Right.
John: It is.
John: I mean, it's absolutely a necessity for rich and poor.
John: And the poorest person in Seattle is still going to have to.
John: log onto the internet to how do you get benefits i mean how do you how do you apply for jobs how do you do any of that stuff yeah the more stuff that we put online the more it becomes a public need a public good and and i think you'll see it with drones too there's there's an argument that like what do you mean the you know i invented this technology drones and then five years from now when our skies are full of unregulated drone traffic
John: we're going to have to recognize that it's a municipality's, it's ultimately like government's job to step in and say, here are the regulations on drones.
John: And all of the drone entrepreneurs are going to scream bloody murder about it.
John: But if the drone entrepreneurs are not regulated, then we will be living in a Victorian environment where,
John: except instead of coal smoke, it's drone noise.
John: As every different... Amazon's running their drones around, and UPS has got their drones, and the city of Seattle's got their drones, and the news camera drones, and then all the private drones.
John: And it's just like, wait a minute, no.
John: No, no, no.
John: We're not just going to...
John: It cannot be chaos.
Merlin: It's almost like being able to ride your horse through somebody's yard.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like, no, no, there has to be some boundaries for where that's okay.
John: And we're coming out of many, many decades of laissez-faire economics and many, many decades of kind of like ratcheting back the idea of what government does.
John: But ultimately, government is there to protect us and to make collective decisions.
John: And there's a reason that the tech world is libertarian.
John: There's a reason that libertarianism is at the core of the tech world.
Merlin: Well, at least of the entrepreneurial part of that.
Merlin: The entrepreneurial part of it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And the pushback – There's all kinds of hippies making the code.
Merlin: Oh, for sure.
Merlin: But if you want to be the first to market and get the funding and be the gorilla and the same way Blu-ray beats HD, I want my railroad, my computer railroad to be the one that wins.
John: Yeah, and what that's going to do I think is push us into a climate where there's a new brand –
John: There's a new understanding of the importance of government and the power of government, and technology is also going to reform government and make it better at what it does.
John: And we're probably entering into a few decades of real tussle between
John: between tech companies and government as government seeks to assert that a lot of these technologies, yes, were developed in your laboratories, but now they constitute a public good and now they need to conform.
John: And that's exciting.
John: It's very exciting because the prospect of autonomously driven electric cars that truly have a kind of equitability baked into them, that's truly a social justice issue, right?
John: People can finally move around without...
John: The onerous expense of maintaining and parking and operating their jalopies.
Merlin: I don't think that's what those folks have in mind.
John: No, I don't think it is what they have in mind at all.
John: But that is really the exciting possibility of it.
John: And we need to ensure that that's how it rolls out.
John: Because, you know, I mean, if you look at the autonomously driven cars that are rolling out right now, Mercedes-Benz has got one that's just like, oh, man, this is really nice.
John: really luxury item, these first cars that drive themselves.
John: But really, in a very short amount of time, we're going to realize, I think, as a group of people, that they're taxi cabs.
John: All of them are taxi cabs.
John: And nobody's going to own their own one.
Merlin: They're all going to be... Yeah, I mean, not to push the analogy, but no more than you would own your own private train and tracks.
John: Exactly.
John: You don't own your own...
John: You just – it's all owned collectively.
Merlin: Part of the value is that the streets connect with other streets.
John: And if you're a super rich dude and you only want to travel around in a super luxury version of the autonomous car, then sure, man, maybe you have one that's your special one.
John: That's great for you.
John: But 99% of us are going to be so grateful to never own a car again that –
John: I mean, honestly, the car I'm driving right now and the cars in my family, we're all talking about this in my family a lot, and the consensus is, can we milk these cars until we don't need them anymore?
Merlin: Oh, that's totally on my mind.
Merlin: We have a leased car right now, and I would love for it to be the last car we own.
John: Yeah, and I think we're looking at, I mean, when I drive by a car lot right now, I'm like, these are the last of these.
John: Or, you know, they'll keep making them, but...
Merlin: people that buy this new car like it's gonna vary so much by area though because for example okay like two places i've just been recently um boston uh providence portland i mean boy the needs of those cities can be served in such different ways like the idea of not having a car in say providence is it's mental like you you it's like you know it's
Merlin: Maybe not as much as in Florida.
Merlin: In Florida, it's completely mental.
Merlin: Like, you have to have a car, period.
Merlin: That's the way the whole state is set up.
Merlin: Whereas here, I mean, there's a reason we did this.
Merlin: My wife needs it to get to work in an efficient way to still have a life.
Merlin: But, boy, we were right on the bubble.
Merlin: I mean, you know, if you suck it up a little bit, you can make it with public transit and a little bit of Lyft and Uber.
Merlin: But it's not there yet, but I think it may be way closer than a lot of people –
Merlin: you know, in a place like Florida or, you know, Missouri, maybe it's coming some places faster than a lot of people realize.
John: Really?
John: I mean, San Francisco and Seattle and Portland will be in L.A.
John: will be the first places.
Merlin: Well, I mean, for example, San Francisco, I think I mentioned this that I should track down my reference on this.
Merlin: But, you know, we have a huge problem in San Francisco.
Merlin: I think it's a problem of people.
Merlin: Basically, it's very easy.
Merlin: I don't know if it's money or if it's influence or it's just lying, but it's not that hard to get a disabled permit.
Merlin: Oh, right, right.
Merlin: In San Francisco, which means A, you get to park where you want, and B, you don't have to pay for parking.
Merlin: You can park in a metered space with a disabled tech.
Merlin: Are there people who need those?
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: But the one count I heard is that there's something like twice as many disabled permits as there are extant metered spaces in San Francisco.
John: Wow.
Merlin: I mean, how does that scale up?
Merlin: I mean, there's so much wrong with that.
Merlin: I don't even know where to begin.
Merlin: But it doesn't add up.
Merlin: I mean, it's sort of like you said with the train between L.A.
Merlin: and San Francisco.
Merlin: What are your options?
Merlin: Drive for six to eight hours?
Merlin: Yeah, you can.
Merlin: You can take a flight, but you end up spending more time in airports than you do in the sky.
Merlin: It's completely inefficient.
Merlin: When really there's – here's these two places.
Merlin: Here's a solution.
Merlin: These are two cities that people want to get from one to the other pretty often more so than other cities.
Merlin: Is it as fast – can you get to Burbank that fast?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: But once you get to LA, you can go to Burbank.
Merlin: You'll be good.
Merlin: That last mile can be accomplished lots of different ways.
Merlin: We don't need a train between every city, but like there's somewhere.
Merlin: It's like a no-brainer.
John: And I feel like all of this is late-stage capitalism.
John: If you zoom out just a little bit and say, okay, let's not presume that capitalism, as currently practiced, is a natural system that God imposed upon us.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: It's a thought technology.
Merlin: Let's just assume for a minute.
Merlin: We know it really is, but let's act like it's not for just a second.
John: Yeah, let's zoom out.
John: And see it for what it is, which is an overlay.
John: It's an attempt to resolve a problem with a system.
John: And now you can see all of the ways that it is currently failing.
John: It is failing to solve the problem of getting from San Francisco to L.A., for instance.
John: That is a problem.
John: And it is a problem that technologies – there are a lot of technologies we could employ –
John: But currently, the technologies and the regulatory environment and our concept of private property and all of that stuff working together is making it very, very increasingly difficult, not easier.
John: It is harder to get from San Francisco to L.A.
John: now than it was in 1960.
Merlin: Can you imagine if you'd said that to people back then?
Merlin: Like in the Brady Bunch era, if you'd said it's actually going to take longer and be more resource intensive.
John: Like all of the highways that we just completed here, here we are in 1960, all of these highways that we just completed that make it easy to get from place to place and these brand new jet airplanes that are allowing us to get from place to place, let me give you a little glimpse of 2015.
John: The highways will be exactly the same and the airplanes will be exactly the same
John: except there will be hundreds of thousands of more people using them.
Merlin: Well, we're not going to be using the planes you invented this year.
Merlin: We're going to be using planes you invented.
Merlin: We're going to still be using the 757.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
John: Like the brand new plane, the top-of-the-line jet airplane of 2015.
John: is a minor series of minor improvements over this plane.
John: Cash in those Eastern and Pan Am points while you can.
John: And the highways, too.
John: You could drive your 1959 Chevy from San Francisco to L.A.,
John: in 1959 and and now and it would take you longer now and it would be worse even if the car was pristine and so if you zoom out a little bit and you say okay let's start thinking a little bit bigger and say capitalism is okay fine it's great everybody calm down it's fine i'm not a communist i'm not trying to take away your fucking house i don't want to make a dr jivago apartment out of your out of your family home and
John: Just hush, hush, hush, hush, hush.
John: But can we step back and say capitalism is an idea, it's a thought technology, and a lot of the government regulation we have that is also badly designed is badly designed in conjunction with capitalistic problems.
John: Like the regulation responded to the capitalism and the capitalism responds to the regulations and that's an unholy relationship.
John: And let's zoom out a little bit and just start to think about some of this stuff a little bit more calmly and purposefully and imagine what a better system we could make with some minor modifications.
John: And some of that is we have to put caps on how much
John: people can make.
John: We really do.
John: You can't just invent an app that you can't just invent Angry Birds and become a billionaire.
John: I don't care.
John: I understand how it works.
John: I understand that you write Angry Birds and it becomes a smash and then you sell your company for a billion dollars.
John: But you zoom out a little bit and you realize that's busted.
John: That's busted.
John: Angry Birds is great.
John: It's fine.
John: but it isn't worth a billion dollars of our collective resources.
John: We should not pay that to you.
John: And the fact that we do is crazy.
John: And so there has to be some kind of sense of...
John: of equitability, but, and I don't just mean like a guaranteed universal income, but just a sense of like, what is your actual contribution?
John: What is, what, what, what does this really do?
John: And what is this really worth?
John: And, and, and take this like wall street casino mentality and see it for what it is.
John: and recognize that it doesn't help us, and the argument that that money orgy is the best and most efficient way of directing resources to innovation and directing resources to...
John: to experimentation and that's how the money follows the success and generates success.
John: It's just like, no, no, no, no, that's crazy.
John: That's crazy.
John: We are living in a crazy world.
John: And we do have the brains and we have the knowledge, we have the data, we have the instruments to measure how crazy it is and to see it and do better and to do better.
John: Break a leg tomorrow.
John: I'm running for public office.
Merlin: Oh, you're kidding.
John: Yeah.
John: Tomorrow's election day.