Ep. 169: "Again With the Pie"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick Online is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: This month, they invited Seth Boyer to help me say hi to John.
Merlin: Keep moving and get out the way.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Burland.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: You sound like a congested Jell-O Biafra.
John: Ebsie Blowfish.
John: And Diane fucking Dragon Lady Feinstein.
John: I don't know what's going on with me.
John: I was up until 4.30 in the morning last night, and then I...
John: I've reverted immediately to type, right?
John: My people are all in France, and it took me three days to just completely revert.
Merlin: Yeah, that's it.
Merlin: That's all it took.
Merlin: 4.30 in the morning.
Merlin: It seems to me that on the one hand, it is your natural predilection to be a night owl, but on the other hand, the thing that brings the night owl-ness out in you is some kind of an interest, often online.
Merlin: Were you drawn to that?
Merlin: Were you sorting things?
Merlin: What kept you up?
Merlin: I was.
John: balancing angels okay on the head of a pin oh that's so nice and then i was balancing the entire contraption on the tip of my finger it's angels all the way down that's right so if you get to what's very right so if you can imagine it's kind of a teatro zenzani it's a little bit of a circus circus oh
Merlin: Soleil de Soleil.
Merlin: Man de Soleil for the Saint-Tropez-Tan.
John: It's a flying Karamazov Brothers of angels, tiny angels.
Merlin: It's like a heavenly flea circus.
John: That's precisely what it is.
John: I'd pay for that.
John: When people would say, how many angels can you balance on the head of a pin, I would always imagine it just like a flea circus.
Merlin: I don't know why you don't just say all of them.
Merlin: That seems like if that was the Google interview question, I would just say all of them.
Merlin: All of them?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What do you mean?
Merlin: How many?
Merlin: Prove me wrong.
Merlin: Show your math.
Merlin: Every angel.
Merlin: All the angels.
John: All the great angels.
John: Even the late angel, the chubby angel that's always late.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
John: He's going to come huffing and puffing up the stairs, and he gets on there too.
Merlin: Sorry, boss.
Merlin: Angel.
Merlin: Angel.
Merlin: I'll have your badge.
Merlin: I was going to ask you how life without the family – I think I mentioned probably after we stopped recording last time.
Merlin: I can't recall, but just how I descend usually within less than 36 hours into a nearly feral state.
John: Yeah, that was part of the Roderick on the Line after dark.
John: After dark.
John: That we always don't record.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: We're just doing shots and talking about life.
John: Just talking about life.
John: Some of the funniest stuff.
John: Some of the most amazing bits.
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
Merlin: We have fun, don't we?
Merlin: Boy, we really do.
Merlin: We get in there.
Merlin: We talk about religion.
Merlin: You got feminism.
John: All the stuff that we can't talk about on the program.
John: Ron Paul revolution.
John: Woo!
John: Woo!
John: It's all in there.
John: Yeah, you... I mean, I have seen you get... Turn into a feral dog...
John: So fast.
John: Faster than almost any other person.
John: If you are not like actually literally being shaved.
John: Like restrained at some kind of a clinic?
John: Well, just like as you are shaving one part of you, the other part is bursting forth with like Wolverine-style bristles.
Merlin: Yeah, well, here's the thing.
Merlin: Here's the thing about that is that I am less –
Merlin: of a totally distracted basket case than I have been at other times in my life.
Merlin: But I am still a very distractible basket case.
Merlin: So, you know, you see me in your home.
Merlin: Like I come in and I've got a little bag of stuff and pretty soon the stuff is everywhere and I can't find anything.
Merlin: I don't know how to feed myself anymore.
Merlin: I get very confused very quickly.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Well, and it's delightful.
John: It's a great affect to have at a bar.
John: When I see you come into a bar and you spread your stuff all around.
Merlin: Nice try.
Merlin: I stand by the door with everything in my bag.
Merlin: The bag is zipped up and I am no more than three paces from the door at all times.
John: Pretty soon you're standing on a bar stool.
John: The bartender becomes a lifelong friend.
Merlin: Oh, that's true.
Merlin: I make Malcolm X look like Grandma Moses.
Merlin: I am ready to get out of anywhere very quickly.
Merlin: I'm kind of a little bit famous for this, I think.
Merlin: I've heard it called the French exit.
Merlin: I've heard it called the Irish exit.
Merlin: I'm not sure what kind of exit it is, but I don't like taking a long time to leave somewhere.
Merlin: So whereas I will spread out in a hotel room or your home in that little special secret room under the stairs, I will, like Harry Potter sleeping in John's house, I will keep all of my stuff ready.
Merlin: I am always waiting for the opportunity to leave anywhere all the time.
John: That's why I always imagined that that backpack was actually a parachute.
Merlin: part of it is like i say what the rest can't say what the rest is and i know you like to be the last person to dive onto the plane or the last person to dive off of the muni train i've seen this you i used to think you were making it up but it's true you stand dead still and i'm like john it's our stop and you're like kind of like barely moving your head shaking your head going like don't even acknowledge that we're together this could be used against us later and then boom
John: You got to get through that door at the last possible second.
Merlin: Because.
Merlin: Why?
Merlin: Because.
Merlin: Yeah, because reasons.
Merlin: Because reasons.
Merlin: Because privacy secrecy.
Merlin: Now, that's bitten you in your behind a couple times in the last couple years, hasn't it?
Merlin: Didn't you miss a flight recently because of that?
John: You know, I missed a couple of flights.
John: And what happened was the airline industry...
John: keeps changing the rules.
John: It keeps moving the goal posts.
John: So they started doing this thing where they're like, well, if you're not, you know, the, the flight leaves at seven 40, uh,
John: But the doors close at 720.
John: Yep.
John: And it's like, well, then the flight leaves at 720.
John: No.
John: No, the flight leaves at 740.
John: But the doors, and I'm like, well, no.
Merlin: That's not on the ticket, dude.
Merlin: There's no doors closing printed on the ticket.
John: Right.
John: I've been on plenty of flights that left at 740.
John: Where the doors closed at 740 and then the plane sat at the airport for another hour and a half.
John: So let's not fuck around with like the flight leaves.
John: It's when the doors close is when the flight leaves.
John: So, yeah, I'm sitting in the sitting in the airport looking around enjoying myself.
John: Cleaning my nails.
John: Yes.
John: Scanning for people in sandals.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: Making sure that there's not some screaming baby.
John: Issuing citations.
John: A little, you know, a little bit.
John: Yeah.
John: You want to make sure the thing about a Spectre agent.
John: Mm hmm.
John: is that you're going to be able to pick that Spectre agent out, not by their own behavior, but how they react to your behavior.
John: And then all of a sudden I look up and the door is closed.
Merlin: Yeah, that's not right.
John: I walk over and I'm like, hey, I'm on this flight.
John: And they're like, not anymore.
Merlin: Good luck finding somebody.
Merlin: I'm off.
Merlin: I bet there's reasons for this.
Merlin: I know two things about this, kind of.
Merlin: I know that an airplane only makes money when it's in the air, and I know that there's a lot of pressure.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure there's a lot of pressure on the whole flight crew to keep their delays down because it looks bad to the company and it looks bad to the public.
Merlin: When you go look something up online, they've got records on this stuff, right?
Merlin: I sent you that link to that amazing website where you can watch real-time flight information.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: That's all publicly exposed.
Merlin: So you can go in and see, hey, this flight from San Francisco to Portland is late 14% of the time or something.
Merlin: So I'll bet that's it.
Merlin: I bet it's also that maybe there's something that makes them look better.
Merlin: They get everybody packed into the fart tube quicker, and that looks better on their quarterly report.
John: Maybe so.
John: I am incapable, like a lot of people in my generation, and I don't want to lump you in to my generation.
Merlin: Lump me, lump me.
John: You're 18 months older than me or something.
John: I'm older than that.
John: But...
John: I find that I am now constitutionally incapable of having any sympathy or even like certainly no commiseration, but also like no even like shared understanding with anyone in the airline industry.
John: If all the facts are there, if it's all laid out like, oh, this makes perfect sense, I cannot sympathize with them because it seems to me that they have all agreed that their business model relies on torturing people for money.
Merlin: It's become a – it's funny because it's not like they didn't want to make money 50 years ago.
Merlin: But for a variety of reasons that are too lengthy to get into, today it is a naturally necessarily adversarial relationship with a lot of gotchas.
Merlin: And like anything, when you reach a certain age, you're always wondering who's trying to fuck you.
Merlin: Like who's going to screw me today and like what should I be looking for?
Merlin: And in the airline industry, I mean that is real.
Merlin: It is totally real.
Merlin: They're going to do as little as possible for you with as few resources as possible and find as many things as they can to charge for because that's just the way the industry works.
Merlin: And to act like it's anything else and talk about things like loyalty.
Merlin: Loyalty?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: What's your loyalty to me?
Merlin: I can't find anybody to talk to to get my family on a plane.
John: Well, and more than any other thing in the contemporary world, they have adopted the idea that seniority, by which they mean this strange loyalty thing that you're talking about, like the more money that you pay...
John: the more opportunities we're going to give you to opt out of being waterboarded.
John: Yep.
John: And, and without that, uh, without that, uh, that buy in, uh,
John: Your only other option is to pay a usurious fee, to pay $2,500 for a ticket.
Merlin: Right, and at the middling levels of that seniority, you mainly get the opportunity to pay slightly less to be waterboarded, to not be waterboarded, but you're still going to pay.
John: Yeah, you're still going to sit in an Iron Maiden while we, like, piss in your mouth.
Merlin: So the only way... Hmm.
Merlin: That just sounds very... Sounds like Lufthansa.
John: Actually, it's called... Maiden Scheisse?
John: What was the one that crashed in the Alps?
John: The guy decided that he wanted to die.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: He said, I'm done.
Merlin: I'm done here.
John: It's not an easy jet.
John: It was Flies and Scheisse.
Yeah.
John: Like flies on Scheisse.
John: Yeah, it was Luftscheisse.
Merlin: Luftscheisse.
Merlin: But you're absolutely right.
Merlin: And the only way that happens is deliberate.
Merlin: Like we're going to – I mean it's a total win for them.
Merlin: You get a lighter, narrower seat so you can put more people into the fart tube.
Merlin: And then you charge them to basically – to be in a seat that is not deliberately uncomfortable.
Merlin: And then with the leaning back, the leaning back.
John: The thing was they used all that –
John: After 9-11, gas prices went crazy.
John: They made all those modifications and justified them at the time because gas was so expensive that they couldn't possibly profit anymore.
John: And so they had to do this.
John: They were being forced to do this by economics.
John: They were being forced to do this by the market.
John: There was no other way.
John: Airlines were – the whole idea of flying –
John: was going to disappear from our minds because gas prices had made it impossible.
John: And then when gas prices went down again, it was not like these are emergency measures and we're going to repeal them as soon as this national crisis is over.
John: Like when gas prices went down, they continued...
John: It continued on that arc, just like, oh, wow, we figured out that we can take away all the padding from the seats and people still fly.
John: What would happen if we put a dead rat in every fourth seat under the padding?
John: Would people still fly?
John: It appears they do.
John: What would happen if we put a hat pin under?
John: in every 15th armrest.
John: Wow, people, let's put one in every armrest.
Merlin: Well, let's be honest.
Merlin: Gas prices were pretty expensive, so hat pins.
John: Hat pins, right?
John: Let's make it impossible to check a bag.
John: And then it turns into a kind of like World War Z...
John: on every airplane as people try to cram their luggage in the overhead compartments, which used to, you know, overhead compartments, you used to be able to, you could have a skateboarding competition in them.
Merlin: Mostly they were empty because people- Now people are bringing two bags and a Suza phone because they don't want to spend $15 and they're happy to charge you for that.
John: Yeah, so then the airlines – then it takes 45 minutes to board instead of 15 minutes to board.
John: And then they're like, oh, boy, we're running out of – it takes too long to board.
John: So now the doors close 20 minutes before the flight takes off.
Merlin: That's to me the huge question mark is – well, first of all, you have the human problem of – well, the human and business problem of there are more and more people traveling who are bringing big things on.
Merlin: Every extra thing that somebody brings on there I think has a geometric contribution to how long it takes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And people don't understand, like, get the fuck out of the aisle.
Merlin: Get out of the aisle.
Merlin: Spend no time in the aisle unless you are moving.
Merlin: Move, move, move.
Merlin: Okay, they don't get that.
Merlin: But then I don't understand.
Merlin: I think this has been experimented with on various airlines.
Merlin: But the way these planes board is bananas.
Merlin: Why?
Merlin: Well, first of all, there's no, like, seeming science to, like, figuring out how to load from the back first.
Merlin: And there's also then the financial component of, hey, it's not going to be fair to all those seniority people to let the people in the back of the plane.
Merlin: Get on first, right?
John: Because you want to spend as much time on the plane as you possibly can.
Merlin: Well, you might be active military service in uniform, platinum, gold, silver, plus international, 100K.
John: With a child that needs extra time.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: So, I mean, it's so funny when I sometimes, like recently on a flight, it was an easy flight to Portland not too long ago, and I was in seating group.
Merlin: Because I was in like United, you know, plus or whatever.
Merlin: We get the slightly bigger chair.
Merlin: And I was like, oh, you get priority boarding.
Merlin: Half the plane got on before I did.
Merlin: Because you got the 100K military gold platinum.
John: Yeah, the diamond platinum silver group.
John: Thank you for your service.
John: The thing that drives me crazy is somewhere along the line, as we became – as the airlines reduced us –
John: to our most basic Bergen-Belsen level of human animal.
Oh, God.
John: People forgot.
John: People realized that even if they were seated in row 34,
John: They could put their bag.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
John: And so all the people loading in the back of the plane get on.
John: They put their bags in the first available bin.
Merlin: Right, which might be on row 11.
John: Because they are going to have to go by there again on their way out.
Merlin: You never want to have your bag behind you, but you're more than happy to have your bag in front of you.
John: Yeah.
John: So this is another thing where I used to sit in the airport and wait until the last possible moment.
John: And I am not, you know, when they said...
John: We're going to charge you for the first six rows of coach.
John: We're going to charge you $100 more for the first six rows of coach because we're going to give you an inch more of leg room.
John: I was like, okay.
John: You know what?
John: I turned into Todd Berry.
John: I was like, okay, fine.
John: I'll pay your $100 fucking dollars.
John: Like, whatever.
John: You've got me, right?
John: I'm just a fucking...
John: I'm just a calf being fatted for slaughter.
Merlin: You're just a meat wallet.
Merlin: You're just a big, moist, meaty object that happens to have a little bit of money.
John: And when they said, now we're going to charge you to sit in the exit row.
John: which is a seat which carries with it tremendous responsibility.
John: And we're also going to charge you to adopt that responsibility.
John: And also seats don't recline.
John: I was like, you know what?
John: Fine.
John: Okay, fine.
John: But then I'm sitting in the airport waiting to be the last person on the plane, enjoying the airport ambience, not yet crammed into the fart tube.
John: And then I am the last one on.
John: I get down to my seat, which I have paid $100 extra for.
John: in row one and there's no place for my bag because somebody in row 34
Merlin: crammed their bag in there on the way by yep there's no there's no attempt at the provenance they're not trying to detect first of all i think they're super fast and loose about what people actually carry on they have all those onerous signs and shit but i see so many people carrying three things on there and they got like they got a fucking crate of fruit oh sure their whole mary k cosmetics thing mary k cosmetics yeah yeah no they're not stopping them which is weird to me it's almost like they want to see us fight it out mad max style
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because then you turn to the flight attendant and say, hey, I'm in this seat and there's no place for my bag.
John: And they look at you like... Like you're a child.
Merlin: Like, have you never flown before?
Merlin: Don't you know you need to run in here and tear people apart?
John: Yeah, yeah, right, exactly.
Merlin: You're weak.
John: We called your row a long time ago, the guy said.
John: And I was like, well, yeah, I know.
John: It's not like...
John: You called my row.
John: I mean, I get to get on when I want, but apparently there are new rules like this was new, right?
John: Up until five years ago, you there was a general there was a social compact that you put your bag above your own seat.
John: I cannot imagine in 1999 someone putting their bag above, unless it was like, well, it never would have happened that you put your bag above somebody else's seat.
John: It never would have happened.
John: It would have been like you put your underwear on somebody else's head.
John: Keep your underwear on your own head.
John: Anyway, Merlin, I don't want to turn our great show and this wonderful time that you and I have to spend together into another show.
John: anti-airline podcast.
John: There are so many of those already.
Merlin: That should be a spinoff.
John: And you and I, you are about to get on an airplane.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: So are you, well, are you driving?
John: Yes.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I bought my flight late and so I actually am in, I'm in the bathroom area.
Merlin: There's exactly one of the San Francisco to PDX flights.
Merlin: It's like row 30 something center seat.
Merlin: But you know, it's like an hour and a half flight.
Merlin: Yeah, that's easy.
Merlin: You do it standing on your head.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: So I'm doing that.
Merlin: You just play pocket pool for an hour and a half.
Merlin: Could I have a blanket, please?
John: I'm going to XOXO Festival.
Merlin: Excuse me.
Merlin: Could I have a fresh blanket, please?
Merlin: What's that moist scraping noise?
Merlin: That's the hydraulics.
Merlin: That's not funny.
Merlin: I have shingles.
Merlin: Ladies and gentlemen, once again, can I ask everybody with shingles at any point on the plane to please stop servicing themselves under the complimentary blanket?
Merlin: Once again, ladies and gentlemen.
Merlin: Oh, once again.
Merlin: Once again.
Merlin: Into the breach!
Merlin: Into the breach!
Merlin: When Morton Joe says that in Fury Road, it's funny because I always think of the airlines, you know, because the very, very, very, very, very first words out of anyone's mouth on the plane every time it's... Once again, ladies and gentlemen, I just want to remind you that to facilitate an all-time wheels up takeoff, everybody go ahead and please move out of the aisle as soon as possible.
Merlin: And also, you know what?
Merlin: Fuck this.
Merlin: We're not going to talk about planes.
Merlin: I also hate how they have to have two words for everything.
Merlin: You can't get up until you come to a full and complete stop.
John: Full and complete.
Merlin: I got a whole list of these.
Merlin: I believe I have written these down.
Merlin: I bet you have.
Merlin: Let me hear them.
Merlin: No, I wrote some short fiction about this one time.
Merlin: Yeah, about the use of two words to describe everything.
Merlin: Oh, God, what are some of the other ones?
Merlin: But yeah, there's a lot of redundancy on a plane.
Merlin: Anyway, I don't want to talk about that.
John: I've never read your fiction.
John: I feel like this is new to me.
Merlin: There's a reason for that.
Merlin: I won't even read my fiction.
John: I thought about this the other day.
John: Why don't you write fiction?
John: There was a time when you were young, you tried to write fiction.
John: You wrote fiction all the time.
Merlin: Sure, everybody wrote fiction.
John: But it's just not in me.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: It's, you know, it's like, yeah, it's a lot of work and who really wants to read it.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You sit down and you're like, Maisie Glotz lives in a neighborhood...
Merlin: In a house.
Merlin: It should always open with weather.
Merlin: That's the thing.
Merlin: Always open with weather.
Merlin: Maisie Glotz looked out upon the rain, the pounding rain.
Merlin: The American scene.
John: No, crumple, crumple, crumple, throw.
Merlin: It's become like poetry at this point.
Merlin: I've made my piece as a young verse smith that the only people who read poems are other poets.
Merlin: And I know it's not entirely true of fiction today, but it kind of feels that way sometimes.
John: That it's just other fiction writers?
Merlin: Yeah, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Can I tell you what I did this morning?
Merlin: Because I'm sitting here.
Merlin: I'm in a lot of pain right now.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: You know what I did?
Merlin: Did you sit on a hat pin?
Merlin: In my dreams.
Merlin: No, I pulled a muscle in my neck opening a curtain.
Merlin: And it's an easy curtain.
Merlin: It's like a real light curtain.
Merlin: All I did was whisk it away with a kind of like Zen-like certainty, like a whoosh.
Merlin: And I whipped a little bit too hard, and now I can barely move my head.
John: Did your children gather around and put your clear plastic carapace on?
John: No.
Merlin: They spray some stuff on me.
Merlin: I guess that's probably sunscreen they spray on him, huh?
John: Strapped into your 59 Cadillac.
Merlin: Brace my metals!
Merlin: That'd be so great if my daughter would put me in a plastic carapace and pin my non-existent metals to me.
Merlin: And then just be like, you are chrome!
Merlin: No, shiny chrome.
Merlin: She's already at school, so you saw the movie, huh?
Merlin: What are you talking about?
John: I went to see the movie the other night again at the Cinerama.
John: Oh, nice.
John: Paul Allen's inner life made outer.
John: And it was like a midnight show.
John: And I was driving around the lonely streets.
John: Pretty much exactly like Glenn Frey in... Joshua Tree?
John: No, and We Belong to the Night.
Merlin: Oh, you belong to the city.
John: You know, the steam coming out of the steam holes.
Merlin: Oh, very cinematographic.
John: It was cinematographic.
John: I was driving around the town all by my lonesome, just looking at the night crawlers.
John: And I was like, there's the Cinerama.
John: Oh, they're playing Mad Max Fury Road.
John: Oh, there's a midnight show.
John: Oh, I'm going to go.
John: And I pulled in and I went and saw it by myself in the middle of the night.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And it's, yeah.
John: I'm watching it over and over now.
John: I'm at the watching it over and over stage.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Me too.
Merlin: And you can tell when I really like a movie because I'll watch it over and over or I'll watch it.
Merlin: When I first got my hands on a copy, I was watching it twice a night, which is weird.
Merlin: Wait, you got your hands on a copy?
Merlin: How do you do that?
Merlin: No, you can't.
Merlin: But as soon as the movie would end and, you know, he'd give that little nod and then little elevators going and you're like, I'm like, that's it.
Merlin: And I would just turn it back on again.
Merlin: Now you can tell I really like it because I'll start like partway through.
Merlin: I'll jump straight to like the last act or, you know.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: I just want to watch that dust storm.
Merlin: Oh, man.
John: Sequence.
Merlin: I have talked about this movie a lot in a lot of places, so I don't want to overdo it, but there is something just spectacular about it, and I still am amazed.
Merlin: And watching the behind-the-scenes stuff, again, I've talked about this a lot, too.
John: What do you mean behind-the-scenes stuff?
John: Where are you getting all this extra material?
John: Is this something that you torrented?
Merlin: I don't know what that is.
Merlin: Also, avoid torrents.
Merlin: They're dangerous.
John: Did you go on The Onion?
John: Are you on the deep web?
Merlin: I watched a Netflix movie about the dark net, the dark web.
John: What did it tell you?
John: Did it tell you not to go into it?
Merlin: It was weird because it was really more about Silk Road.
Merlin: It was meant to be – so it's directed by Bill and Ted.
Merlin: Well, Ted – Bill directed it and Ted is the narrator.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: And it's mostly about Silk Road.
Merlin: Alex Cox did this.
Merlin: And is that his name?
Merlin: Or is that the guy that said Nancy?
Merlin: Am I confused?
Merlin: Alex Winter.
Merlin: Alex Winter.
John: Alex Winter.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So anyway, it was good.
Merlin: And it was really sad.
Merlin: It was super sad.
Merlin: I learned that the guy.
Merlin: Get ready for this.
Merlin: Guess what?
Merlin: Turns out at one point they showed.
Merlin: They said this guy lived in West Portal.
Merlin: And they showed a flash.
Merlin: And turns out he was living in a place that I go by all the time.
Merlin: That's just about half a mile from my house.
John: Wow.
John: Did you go knock on the front door of his cardboard box?
Merlin: I've always known this place to be totally sketchy.
Merlin: It has a real Russian mobster feel.
Merlin: If you're leaving from my house, you take the L and you make that right turn onto 15th by the butcher shop.
Merlin: And there's this place on the corner.
Merlin: Sometimes it's a beauty salon.
Merlin: Mostly it's just a lot of guys out front smoking.
Merlin: And so, yeah, he had a sublet there.
Merlin: He had a fake name.
Merlin: And that's where the Silk Road guy lived for a while.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: What a crazy – have you watched that movie?
Merlin: It's crazy.
John: No, because after my several years on 4chan.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
John: I purposely ejected myself from the seedy underbelly of the internet and never to return.
John: It was, you know, there was a while there where I was like, listen, I am not going to go gently into this good night.
John: I'm going to rage rage against the dying of the light.
John: I am going to know about all of the dark corners.
Merlin: This is your Pete Townshend research.
John: Well, you know, I was not – Well, just that you were putting your nose – no, no, that you were putting your nose into a lot of dark corners.
John: Because up until the internet, I tried as a young person to know all of the dark corners of life that I could stomach.
John: firsthand, right?
John: I went into the actual door of places that repelled me because I didn't want to be somebody that didn't know the limits of – at first I thought the limits of human experience and then I realized I was never – I was not capable of exploring the limits of human experience.
John: But I was capable of exploring the limits of my own.
John: my own limits as far as like where I became not just uncomfortable, but where I became, where I felt like under siege or, you know, I would, I would go do, I would subject myself.
Merlin: You're, you're pushing your own limits as well as discovering the, how far other people had gone.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And so like, could I participate in rough trade?
John: No.
John: Could I witness rough trade?
John: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: And that was part of how I was trying to make myself.
John: So when a lot of that went to the internet, I was like, well, I have to, you know, I can't let it go.
John: I can't let there be worlds that I don't know about.
John: I mean, there are certainly corners of the world I prefer not to know about.
John: But there can't be worlds I don't have any knowledge of.
John: And so, yeah, I went in there like, who's in here?
John: You know, slam open.
John: Hello.
John: Who's it?
John: And then I was like, oh, shit.
John: Yeah.
John: And and then I was then I was quiet and sitting on a hard stool in what I hoped was an unnoticeable corner of a place where I was like a lot of this, a large percentage of this is fake.
Merlin: Fake or heavily exaggerated.
John: Yeah, it's like anything on the internet.
John: Like it doesn't cost anything for a 16-year-old to dummy up a world.
John: And you just see that it doesn't hold water.
John: And I'm not somebody that can say like, oh, that's been shooped or whatever.
Yeah.
John: But enough of it is – enough of what I saw was just like indisputably true and I knew about it.
John: I knew about it in my –
John: In my mind's eye, I had read accounts.
John: But on the internet, you can see it.
John: You can pay for it.
John: And I was like, oh, right.
John: So it is ultimately kind of limitless.
John: what humans can do and do do.
John: I didn't, I guess I needed that confirmed.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Because you don't, because you don't think about it.
John: And there are always, there were always doors that I didn't go.
John: You know, you go into the door and there's a bunch of guys sitting around and you go through the second door and there's a fewer guys in there.
John: Then they make you uncomfortable.
John: And then there's a third door and the question in everybody's eyes is like, you're going to go through the third door.
John: And most of the time you say, no, as a matter of fact, thank you.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: This second door was enough for me.
John: Makes me feel weird already.
John: I'm out of here.
John: But but so, yeah, Silk Road, it just seemed like, oh, yeah, a bunch of people buy an ecstasy on the Internet.
John: But some of that some of that.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, there are there are there are a variety of.
Merlin: Well, you know, I don't get too deep into it, but I mean, there's I think there's a lot of a lot of good.
Merlin: valid and noble, even noble reasons for wanting to say, hey, look, not everybody needs to know what I'm doing all the time.
Merlin: And I think of all the edgy stuff going on in the world today.
Merlin: I think that's pretty excusable to say that, like, hey, you know what?
Merlin: The only way that something like that obfuscation through tour works is if you use it for everything.
Merlin: If you have a house, if you have a room in your house where you go only to masturbate, then that's going to get known as the masturbation room.
Merlin: That's just going to happen.
Merlin: Office, Merlin, office.
Merlin: It's called a studio.
Merlin: It's called the studio.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's a private studio.
John: Could I have a fresh blanket, please?
John: That's my studio.
John: Look, nobody goes into my studio.
John: That's where I have all my figurines, action figurines arranged on the shelves.
Merlin: Action figurines.
Merlin: I like the idea of like Hummels or Yadros of Deadpool.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: Yeah, anyway, I don't know.
Merlin: I feel like I'm such an old man in this sense where I can't help but believe that anything that you expose yourself to repeatedly on purpose will eventually have some kind of –
Merlin: an effect on you.
Merlin: No, Merlin, video games do not cause violence.
Merlin: I'm not even saying that.
Merlin: I'm saying that like, you know, you can just look further than anybody who's in like, you know, look at the career longevity of people who do stuff like, you know, child protective services or homicide or anything like that.
Merlin: Just what you have to, huh?
John: He's been doing homicide for 20 plus years now.
John: Who has?
John: Richard Belzer.
John: Oh.
John: Both of those guys.
John: They never get tired.
Merlin: No, no, they they're made of tougher stuff.
Merlin: But, you know, and I think of this even as like, and I obviously I don't know exactly what you're talking about, but I can guess it's a lot of probably about human suffering and grossness.
Merlin: And I mean, we've all been interested in things, whether even if it's just something like research magazine, where you're like, or you know what I mean?
Merlin: Or those those trade paperbacks of research where you're like, wow, it's amazing.
Merlin: This guy wants to hang from hooks.
Merlin: That's got to be one of the most out there things I've ever seen.
Merlin: But like if you expose yourself to – you know what?
Merlin: I sound like a ding-a-ling.
Merlin: I just think – I try to be careful about what I expose myself to too often because it will have an impact.
Merlin: Even if that impact is now I'm a nerd toward how base people can be and I start imagining everybody is like that, which they're not.
John: No, no.
John: I mean, the horrible stuff is all the stuff where it's, you know, the research stuff was all very mind expanding at the time.
John: The idea that somebody would want to hang from their nipples.
Yeah.
Merlin: It was like Bob.
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: The super masochist.
Merlin: You remember him?
John: Sure.
Merlin: What's Bob?
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: But he was everywhere.
Merlin: He was like the patron saint of research, right?
John: Yeah.
John: And that was that was that was those were fun times and interesting times.
John: But what what it was consensual.
Merlin: It was like I choose I choose to put a hula hoop in my nipple.
Merlin: Like that's the thing I do.
John: Yeah, the internet gives you access to all those people whose pleasure is to cause suffering to other people who aren't volunteering.
John: And that's the stuff where you're just like, oh, there's no limit to that.
John: Like the depravity...
John: We all – there's this crazy thing in our culture and I suffer from it too, which is that morbid fascination with serial killers.
John: And serial killers become a kind of proxy for all of the worst of us.
John: And it's amazing that –
John: Hundreds of thousands of people have read detailed accounts of what Ted Bundy did.
John: Right.
John: Like, I don't know, millions of people maybe have?
John: And what Gary Ridgway did, like, read those accounts and mulled them over and turned them over in their minds and said, like, wow, like, awful, awful.
John: But also, like, not so awful that I didn't buy and read this book about it.
John: Or, like, so awful, in fact, that I bought and read this book about it.
Merlin: It's a little bit, I have to be honest, it's a little bit pornographic.
Merlin: Because I've found myself drawn to that, too.
Merlin: And it's why I sometimes ask myself, like...
Merlin: Like, you know, whether it's that horrible picture of the little boy drowned on the beach that we've all recently seen or whether it's a documentary about the Holocaust, I do try to catch myself and go like, is this – how much of this is empathetic?
Merlin: How much of this is educational?
Merlin: How much of this is just purely sensationalistic and verging on pornography?
John: Well, and that's what's so crazy because, I mean, we've talked about the Nazis a lot and the Holocaust a lot.
John: But the amount of time I've spent imagining what it was like from the standpoint of almost everybody at Auschwitz, like the people who were running it, the people who were –
John: Going into the showers, the people who were clearing out the showers.
John: Right.
John: And all by way of, in some ways, understanding what we are.
John: and it, and it informs this worldview that I have that like, like civil, not just civilization, but, but good and evil, um, rights and, and rules, you know, they're all systems that we are, that we impose upon ourselves and more or less are living according to voluntarily.
John: And, um,
John: And they don't believe that the dark side is kept at bay by rules.
John: The dark side is framed by rules.
Merlin: Yeah, without rules, you couldn't make the dark side scalable.
John: But what 4chan and what the Tor and what the deep web...
John: showed me was that like the banal, the banality of it, but also that isn't even descriptive.
John: Like Bundy was not unusual even.
John: And, you know, and there's just, there's just suffering on, on top of suffering in this world.
John: Suffering that like,
John: suffering that we are imposing on people, suffering in the form of just millions and millions of people living in conditions that are not unimaginable.
John: They're very imaginable.
John: They're witnessable.
John: And yet somehow we compartmentalize those things such that we are able to be so mad about Apple customer service
John: Or so mad about the airlines.
John: And you can be sitting on an airline so mad about your treatments and open a book where the book is detailing scenarios where bodies are piled upon bodies and
John: And you're just like, oh, my goodness, grotesque.
John: You know, that was 60 years ago.
John: Or that's happening right now, but in Burma.
John: Or that's happening right now, but in basements all across Russia or something.
John: But excuse me, miss, miss, I need more ice in my free soda here.
John: And it's something that I can't ever...
John: I can't ever get a purchase on reality, I guess.
John: There is no reality.
John: And there's only my reality, my present reality.
John: And, you know, and maybe that's why I'm up at 430 in the morning, stacking angels on the head of a pin.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Could be part of it.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: I, you know, I also wonder sometimes how much of it is a form of chasing the dragon, which you've described as that feeling of, especially with heroin, of the first high you get from that, you'll never really replicate without increasing the amount, but it still won't really be the same.
Merlin: And it's like you can't really replicate that.
Merlin: And I wonder if there's just – part of it is that you become – one becomes slightly addicted to something that makes you seem to feel more strongly than you've ever felt before.
Merlin: And I'm putting this in really simple terms because I think there is something to be said for educating yourself about all kinds of stuff in the world that's not savory.
Merlin: Just knowing about it doesn't mean you agree with it.
Merlin: But there is stuff that everybody needs to know about, even stuff that's not particularly nice.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Now, do you need to spend five hours a night on that?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: And it depends on what we're talking about, I guess.
Merlin: But I also think part of it just might be that, I don't know, and this might sound old-fashioned, but I think that the more what you're generally calling rough trade, the more kind of shocking stuff that you expose yourself to, the more you want to see.
Merlin: And that doesn't just have to be Bob Flanagan's super masochist.
Merlin: That could also be, like, how much crazier is Kanye West going to get from
Merlin: This guy's a nut and I have an opinion about it.
Merlin: And it seems – I think all of that serves a kind of addiction, a kind of addictive personality that people have.
Merlin: It's just that it may find more or less objectionable outcomes.
Merlin: But I think there's something to a lot of people where they're always looking for that next thing that's going to make them feel this charge or get this dopamine hit.
Merlin: and it becomes very difficult to pull yourself away from that.
Merlin: And you find yourself seeking something that makes you feel stronger and stronger until it can become consuming.
Merlin: Does that sound like a crazy anti-pornography kind of stance?
Merlin: I don't mean it that way, but it sounds like what people would say about pornography.
John: I think it's important for all of us to recognize when we are in an unhealthy relationship with any kind of
Merlin: External source of stimulation.
John: Yeah, any stimulus, right?
Merlin: Especially anything outside of us where like the reason you don't take fucking cold pills because you don't want that, right?
Merlin: I mean, anytime where whatever dragon we're chasing, there's something out there that we know is potentially capable of giving us a certain kind of surprisingly strong stimulation.
John: Yeah, and it ends up being anytime you've been in the hospital where you had a morphine drip and you see that you've got a button, you can push the button and give yourself morphine when you're in pain.
John: But the nurses have some governor on it.
John: It's not just unlimited.
John: But...
John: there's a big difference between the people that sit and wait until they have kind of when they can feel the pain is becoming unendurable and then they push the button versus the people that are just like waiting for the button to re-up you know they're pushing it all the time and that waiting for the re-up you know and that is in our culture
John: The whole game.
John: I mean, everybody out there is waiting for us to... Everybody out there is trying to provide us another opportunity to re-up.
John: Re-up with Star Wars.
John: Re-up with the next episode of The Americans.
John: Re-up with the cool new shoes that you deserve because you work hard.
John: The re-up that...
John: The buying and the pleasing yourself and the pleasuring yourself and to resist it when it comes from all corners because your minister on Sunday is also like –
John: providing a version of it and your parents are providing you versions of it and it's the we have turned it into we've fetishized consumption in all walks of life so that just you know to say I've had enough pie I've had a you know no thank you I don't need seconds and
John: is not just like to potentially offend the host, but to be a radical, like to be seditious almost, to say, no, thank you, no, I do not want...
John: I cannot join in the excitement about the new Star Wars, not because I'm not kind of excited about the new Star Wars, but because there are too many opportunities for it to, you know, too many opportunities for that kind of stimulation to own me.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Because you're an INFJ, right?
John: Yeah.
John: Again with the pie.
John: Again with the pie, right?
John: No, but I was using pie in a different way in that.
John: Yeah, no, no.
John: I heard the word pie go by, and I was like, oh, shit, pie.
John: But wait, it's a different – I'm talking about a different thing.
Merlin: I get that with video games.
Merlin: That's me and video games.
Merlin: I have come to realize that video games can be very special and awesome, but I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but I don't want that in my life because for me to get to the level where I could really enjoy it the way my friends enjoy it would take so many hours and days and weeks, which I might really enjoy, but all I can think about is what I won't be doing.
Merlin: when I'd be doing that.
Merlin: And it's an attractive, it says the same in law, it's an attractive nuisance.
Merlin: Like if I have that in the house, I'm either going to feel bad about the fact that I paid $500 for this game box and don't use it, or I'm going to feel terrible about the amount of time I spend on my $500 game box.
Merlin: Neither of those for where I am mentally right now or emotionally right now is going to make me feel good about that.
John: Right.
John: But, but there's the other, like the danger, I think in seeing, because I'm not somebody that sees tyranny, right?
John: As a conspiratorial, you know, like I'm not worried about outside forces.
John: with a gun to my head, forcing me to kneel and eat the gruel.
Merlin: You're not worried about being colonized?
John: No, as much as I'm worried about that process of voluntary submission.
John: And all of the small government libertarians up in Montana who are worried about Obama's jackbooted thugs are strange to me because they are all...
John: like greedily gulping at the teat of whoever the service providers of their own mythology and products and they are buying into and buying with money all of the accoutrements of their cult thinking –
John: With no self-awareness, right?
John: And that stuff is the real... That's where your mind is really colonized, where they are the rats tapping on the red button that's satisfying their urge to feel persecuted.
John: So I'm not worried about the ATF coming through the door.
John: I'm worried about...
John: To what degree I am self-medicating by my consumption of – and I'm not – serial killer porn isn't what I'm worried about.
John: And eventually I'm not sure – or ultimately I'm not sure what I am worried about because I guard myself so carefully against ever –
John: becoming a consumer.
John: But that becomes a...
John: a strange kind of addiction.
John: The, the addiction of like denial and discomfort and like, no, I will not, I will not watch this again, even though I want to, because I don't want to become a prisoner to it.
John: And so what ends up happening is – I remember I used to get into arguments at the University of Washington all the time when I got back from long, long stays in Germany and tried to convince people that there is nothing in contemporary Germany that would indicate the Holocaust.
John: There's nothing in contemporary Germany that would give you –
John: um, special insight into what happened there 70 years ago.
John: Uh, you, you cannot detect it.
John: You can't detect it in Germans.
John: You cannot detect it in the ground.
Merlin: Is this where you're talking about like how swastikas have been chipped off the bridges and stuff?
John: Yeah, but the swastikas have been chipped off of the bridges of their minds too.
John: Like whatever it was, whatever it was that was in the, the Germans was,
John: is not visible, uh, in, in being friends with Germans in interacting with Germans.
John: It's not, you don't, you don't go to Germany and say, Oh boy, I see.
John: It's just, they're just, they're just playing nice right now.
John: Um, but if the opportunity arises, they're all going to become monsters again.
John: Like that is not the case.
John: They are as committed to liberal democracy there as anyone in the world.
Um,
John: and are just as humane as the most, like, uh, they're just as committed and just as, um,
John: There's nothing in their character that suggests it.
John: And so what that says to me is that it is in all of our character all the time.
John: They are not just pretending to be liberal Democrats there.
John: They are deeply...
John: liberal Democrats and so that's not the evidence you know and the fact that it didn't happen in Sweden doesn't make the Swedes superior to the Germans morally or otherwise and so it's that impulse to slaughter and that impulse to be ridded of impurity and the impulse to systematize
John: not just murder but to systematize inhumanity is in us all, not even really dormant but just being exercised in different ways.
John: It's being satisfied in different ways.
John: And so it's all of our responsibility to recognize it in ourselves in those small ways and say, listen, I am – the Holocaust is in me.
John: I could commit this.
John: I am not one of the ones who would have stood –
John: stood up and said, no, I am absolutely one of the ones who would have drawn the blinds and said, oh, I'm not sure what the smell is that's coming from the forest.
John: Right.
John: You know, and that acknowledgement...
John: And the recognition that it always starts... The arguments that we have about violent movies don't cause violence and violent video games don't cause violence.
John: And it's such a thing on the internet that if you're on the wrong side of it, you're like...
John: You're some PMRC anti-pornography.
Merlin: Yeah, some kind of a scold.
John: A scold, like you're saying.
John: And in fact, like those things, no, they do not cause violence.
John: They are outlets for this tremendous violence that's in us all.
John: And that's the thing we should always be looking at and thinking about and where –
John: Because so many people in my experience refuse to acknowledge the violence that's in them at all.
John: And so when violence arrives on the scene, even in the form of like confrontation about something in a Starbucks line, there's all this like, oh, everyone's so appalled.
Yeah.
John: because we're all we're also basically civilized because we're civilized now and like any amount of violence any raised voices or angry looks are this like terrible assault and and we're and we should be above it but in fact like
John: We each of us and all of us are complicit in murder every day.
Merlin: That's – I didn't want to interrupt you, but this is what keeps – everything you're saying gets me thinking about something that feels like an elephant in the room.
Merlin: You're describing a Germany where like you think about most Americans and most Americans – a lot of Americans definitely when I was growing up with memories of World War II –
Merlin: The – depending on how you measure it, what would that be?
Merlin: The 16 to 20-some years that the Nazis had some kind of power and weren't just – they were not just dictating, that they had actually – they had the support of industry and people.
Merlin: But that was – what was that?
Merlin: That was maybe 20 years.
Merlin: And we still think of – yeah, right, really 15, 16 years.
Merlin: And now we still think of like, oh, Germany, they were the Nazis.
Merlin: But what you're describing is a country where it is not simply a matter of having – trying to obliterate the past but trying to like actively evolve to be different people.
Merlin: Well, at the same time, you know, I'll be that guy.
Merlin: We give ourselves a pass for 400 years of slavery and probably 200 or 300 years of slaughtering natives.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And all kinds of other stuff where like we give ourselves a pass for that and we look old, shush, shush.
Merlin: We look at all these places where people are treated really badly.
Merlin: But we don't ever – it isn't as though we stop to pause whether that monster is still in us.
Merlin: We know that monster is still in Germany because they were the bad guys in World War II.
Merlin: But while it may have happened –
Merlin: The worst parts of that kind of racism and colonialism may have happened over 150 years ago in our case.
Merlin: We were pretty good at it and institutionalized it way beyond what the Germans did.
Merlin: We were able to make entire industries out of having slaves.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It was a business.
Merlin: We talked about it.
Merlin: There was no attempt to erase the record of that or burn the books that showed who'd been sold to whom, whose child had been sent to another state.
Merlin: There was no attempt to cover that up because it was evolving so slowly.
Merlin: And now today we look at that, oh, that's ancient history.
Merlin: But I guess what I'm trying to ask partly is, first of all, I guess two parts.
Merlin: I mean, isn't it fair to say we've all still got that monster?
Merlin: And second of all, do you think we have made the same effort as a modern German would to try and actually evolve past
John: your historical monster because it sounds like we aren't i the i think the i think the scale of time it's so it's so funny that a human life is what 90 years and in the course of 90 years like
John: It's the totality of reality, right?
John: We don't really know that anything that happened before us actually happened.
John: I mean, there are some buildings standing around that you presume were built before you were born, but it all seems a little unreal.
John: that anything happened before you.
Merlin: I've never been to Nicaragua, but I assume it's real.
Merlin: I've read a lot about it.
John: I've never been there either, but I assume it's real.
John: I've seen pictures in books.
John: But 90 years, that's the whole of our real firsthand experience.
John: And so everything seems so important to us, and we're so concerned with
John: With a year and five years and 15 years, but really that, you know, like almost, almost nothing happened.
John: that happens in 15 years really, you know, it really matters or, or it's sort of the great man theory of history, right?
John: That, that one person can have this tremendous effect, but the more you zoom out, the more you realize it's just waves of, of, uh, events and there, there, and it's kind of a myth that, that, um, that even Hitler, uh,
John: really had that much of an effect.
John: If you zoom out and look at it on a, certainly on a thousand year timeline, but on a 10,000 year timeline, like it just disappears.
John: And I think about this a lot and it gets me in trouble because like you read the thing not very long ago where the current thinking is that
John: the trauma of the Holocaust actually is encoded genetically.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: In the survivors.
Merlin: In the next generation.
Merlin: And you said, if that's true, it basically, it changes a lot of what we know about history.
John: It changes.
John: It absolutely changes history, but at a certain point, like it, it, in the immediate scale, it changes it because it means like, Oh, right.
John: The African American population of the United States has a genetic, uh,
John: memory of 400 years of slavery.
John: Like the Holocaust happened not in 15 years.
John: The Holocaust largely happened in two years, right?
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: And if that— It was like they had 18 really strong months, but it was not—you cannot just overlay that with the war.
Merlin: I mean, it was really—well, I'm certainly absolutely not trying to minimize it, but it—the really—when the Holocaust or the final solution, I should say, really got going, I mean, it wasn't more than two or three years, really, right?
John: No, it started in 1942.
Yeah.
John: If that left a genetic imprint on surviving generations, then slavery, I mean, was reinforced and reinforced through generation and generation and generation.
John: And if that's true, then...
John: then there's something, then there's a genetic record that has been, that then starts to be part of natural selection, right?
John: People are passing that down and passing the reinforcement of it down in generations.
John: But if that is true, you don't have to zoom out very far to say, well, that is true of every single person on earth.
John: Like the...
John: Just in the historical record, you can go back and find like, well, the Scots were brutalized by the English.
John: The, you know, the the Thai people.
John: are only in Thailand because they were chased out of China 2,000 years ago.
Merlin: Chinese got some pretty bad treatment from the Japanese.
John: Right.
John: And the Mongol hordes that swept through Eastern Europe over and over and over again, just wiping out –
John: cultures after cultures and so then you look at every single human group and you find in their history like incredible trauma incredible trauma inflicted on them as a group not just individual people and then when when you factor in that every single family has
John: like probably unmeasurable trauma in their past.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean just think about even – so we try to measure these kinds of tragedies by the number of people who died and you can't even really – how do you begin to take into account the secondary effects of like all the people you knew?
Merlin: who were affected by it, or the people who, let's just be honest, the people who were killed as part of that.
Merlin: But then, let's say you, you know, just having, just the PTSD of having lived through that at all, even if you came out of it with most of your stuff and your family alive, can you still even imagine the PTSD of getting through that experience, quote-unquote unscathed?
Merlin: You're not unscathed.
Merlin: Like, you'll be scarred forever by that experience.
John: Well, sure, and, I mean, imagine surviving a famine where
John: where you watch your children die and you watch your parents die and you watch your loved ones die and you survive somehow.
John: If trauma is encoded in our genes, like our forefathers, all of us, survived death.
John: like exponential compounded trauma.
John: It's the story of humanity.
Merlin: So this is the same people who passed in the Holocaust also where their, their grandparents were the victims of pogroms.
John: Right.
John: And, and, and back and all the way, you know, and, and everyone.
John: So trauma.
John: So at that point, it isn't news because we're all baked out of trauma and, and,
John: And so that is the human story.
John: All of us have it.
John: The number of people who can go back 500 years and say, no, as a matter of fact, for the last 500 years, I come from royal stock and we've done nothing but eat the fat of the lamb for...
John: for 500 years and it's like really you didn't have there was nobody in that family that got early onset alzheimer's disease and and turned a generation uh into like like traumatized a generation um and and even so that presumes that 500 years of good times erases the 50 000 years of trauma
Merlin: You guys had a pretty good run there for a while.
John: That genetically good times kind of get encoded in there too.
John: And I mean I presume that they must, right?
John: If trauma shows up in the genetic record, then good times and lands aplenty must too.
John: And so it does.
John: It changes our understanding of history.
John: It changes our understanding of ourselves.
John: But there's no group of people that can say that they have some kind of lock on trauma.
John: We can see that there are groups in recent history, in recent memory, who say like, yes, I personally experienced trauma or my grandmother did.
John: But...
John: But it's all part of the ones and zeros that make up our whole selves.
John: And so right now we're engaged in this civilizing project that's been happening since the end of World War II where we've changed the definition of what civilized is.
John: And we've all agreed more or less on this kind of like what we'd like it to look like.
John: But within America, obviously, we have two major different versions of what that looks like.
John: And now we're engaged in this like rooting out of heresy and this presumption that we can clean ourselves of our impulses to be predatory.
John: Clean ourselves of our impulses to hurt one another and to...
John: to be greedy and be xenophobic and and to live in fear and to act in fear and we can we can clean that behavior out of us and
John: and walk into this future we imagine where we're kind, where our natures are kind, and where unkindness isn't, you know, we go through this difficult birthing period where unkindness isn't tolerated in order to achieve a world where unkindness doesn't occur to us.
John: And that is a major thing
John: thought experiment first and, and I don't have, I don't, I'm not sure that it works that way.
John: So that's the, that's the difficulty I get into looking at history and, and, and going on 4chan and, and trying to understand people.
John: It's just that what is our project?
John: Is it to cleanse ourselves and become good?
John: Sadly, that was the impulse the Nazis had too.
John: And that's always been the impulse of all the awful things that we've done in the last 400 years.
Merlin: I never thought of it that way.
John: It's like we want to clean ourselves and get to a place where the dirtiness doesn't reappear.
John: And we're doing it again now.
John: And...
John: and I'm not comparing it to the Holocaust, but what do we see?
John: What is the evidence that we can be cleansed that way?
John: And without that evidence, what's another way of looking at it?
John: What's an alternative goal?
John: where we stop imagining that we can rid ourselves of evil and stop imagining that we can rid ourselves of violence and start imagining how we can accept those things about ourselves and incorporate those things into a true clear-eyed understanding of what kind of animals we are.
John: But nobody seems to engage in that project because to presume that we can't be perfect is to – so many people are just like, well, if we can't be perfect, then I don't want to play.
John: If we can't be perfect, then that means –
John: That means there's too much potential ugliness.
John: And so instead I prefer to believe that we can be perfect.
John: And that should begin with my neighbors.
John: That impulse to perfect people is going to start with me trying to perfect my neighbors.
John: And it's just like, oh, here we go again.
Merlin: I did pull a muscle in my shoulder.
Merlin: Where's my pricked?
Merlin: You're fucking getting old.
Merlin: You're falling apart right in front of us, Merlin.
Merlin: I already cut the show.
Merlin: You can't hear it.
Merlin: That'll never air.
Merlin: Can I please get a fresh blanket over here?