Ep. 174: "Infuntainment"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Braintree.
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Merlin: Red leather, yellow leather.
Merlin: Narrow stairs, narrow stairs.
Yeah.
Merlin: You know, problem with podcasts, people talk too much.
John: Boy, and this podcast in particular.
Merlin: Well, you know, people don't just pause.
Merlin: Pause is just think and reflect.
John: You've been on a lot of podcasts where I'm guessing there are some long pauses.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And it almost never happens on this one.
Merlin: No, we don't suffer from silence.
John: But now it's good.
John: It's nice to just take a moment and... You think it makes people uncomfortable?
John: I think so, yeah.
John: I mean, I like to reflect in these moments on how much this podcast means to me.
John: You want to take a minute?
John: You know, as I was driving in, I drive into this podcast in particular.
John: It's different than other drives.
Merlin: Your drive into this podcast.
John: As I'm driving into this podcast, I am reflecting.
Merlin: Are you really thinking about the podcast before you're on it?
John: No, no, no, not the podcast in particular, but the podcast in general.
John: I think I am so grateful for this podcast that gives me the opportunity to take this drive.
John: From where I was to where I'm going to be.
John: There's something about the scheduling of this podcast in particular.
John: Somewhere halfway along the route.
Merlin: On the long drive writ large.
John: That's right.
John: Somewhere along the line there.
John: I drive by a methadone clinic.
John: And it's a very, very large, it's industrial scale methadone clinic.
John: It's been scaled up to accommodate the burgeoning population of heroin junkies in the Northwest.
John: It's a very large facility.
John: And it's a large facility that has not, it's appropriated an old building and it has not accommodated, it has made no accommodation for the fact that what was once probably a nut and bolt factory now has 700 people in various stages of recovery trying to make it in the front door.
John: you know, at, at, at specific times.
John: And so the, so you're driving along to do here I am.
John: I'm thinking about the pot.
John: I'm thinking about how much I appreciate the podcast.
John: I'm driving into the podcast and then there's a turn, a bend in the road.
John: And then all of a sudden it's like you've come upon the scene of the defense of the Polish post office in Danzig and
John: Like people are scrambling across the street.
John: Cars are parked at like seven different diagonal angles to one another.
John: Cars are up on the sidewalk.
John: People are pushing their friend across the street in a shopping cart.
John: There are fireworks going off.
John: And it's just like, whoa.
John: And everybody has to break the, you know, the trucks are all like weird.
John: And none of the people who are on their way to or from the methadone clinic ever look either way.
John: They are unconscious of there being traffic.
John: There's no, this is a thing about, I don't know what your experience of heroin junkies is, but they do not practice the principle of keep moving and get out of the way.
John: That's a shame.
John: The ones that are moving are not getting out of the way.
John: And the ones that are maybe a little bit out of the way are not moving.
John: Okay.
John: So, and the thing is, you know, I have not an inconsiderable amount of experience dealing with this crowd.
Merlin: Is it a little like driving through a school zone?
Merlin: You've got to be extra careful, I'm guessing?
John: The thing is, kids have been taught to look both ways.
John: Right, sure.
John: Whereas junkies have forgotten everything they learned as children.
John: So, yeah, you have to be, I mean, to really make sure that you don't get into a calamity, you have to slow to three miles an hour.
John: And it throws me out of my reverie, which is not, you know, again, my problems are small beans compared to the desire of someone who is on a heroin product to not feel like spiders are crawling underneath their skin.
Yeah.
John: Those are – that's a different degree of problems.
John: But it does often then send me into the last 10 minutes of my drive in a different – thinking about different things.
John: Not thinking about – not just blank –
John: Not tabula rasa, but tabula blanco, tabula negro.
Merlin: Oh, or tabula light gray.
Merlin: There's something there.
John: Yeah, tabula light gray.
John: Yeah, it's a tabula, but it's covered with scribbles now.
Merlin: Is there no alternate route?
John: No, there's no alternate route.
John: One of the great things about Seattle is that it was built, premised on the idea that there should be as few alternate routes as possible.
Merlin: That's forward thinking.
John: Because we have a lot of waterways, bridges, tunnels.
John: Not surprisingly few tunnels, actually.
John: But yeah, everything has to get around something else.
John: And it all has to just funnel down to...
John: To the one road.
John: If you live one place, you know your road.
John: Your one road.
Merlin: September 1st, 1939, the personnel from the post office, they defended the post office against assaults from the Nazis, well, from the SS in particular, for 15 hours.
Merlin: That's amazing.
John: Then they were all executed.
John: The thing about Danzig, of course, free city, but a lot of Germans there.
John: And the Polish post office in Danzig was like an embassy.
John: Oh, because you can get your papers worked on and stuff.
John: Well, and it was considered like a sovereign part of Poland.
John: Almost like an embassy.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: But also a post office.
John: You know, people used to, post offices used to really matter.
John: It was like you go for surgery at your barber, right?
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: You'd go to the post office for all of your, now is it post offices or is it posts office?
Merlin: Post office.
Merlin: That's a really good question, like attorneys general.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm just on this one page, Gdansk.
Merlin: They used to call it Gdansk and then it was Danzig.
John: Well, it was Danzig is the German name.
John: Gdansk is the Polish name.
John: They have a lot of diacriticals in Polish, John.
Merlin: Yeah, they do.
Merlin: Yeah, they do.
Merlin: Lots, which I know, unfortunately, from the Lots ghetto, it's a four-letter word that has three different diacriticals in it.
John: Yeah, the Czechs do that, too.
John: They're throwing diacriticals at you right and left, and you're like, Jesus Christ, man.
John: Just decide how to pronounce the letter C.
John: Like, or make some more letters or something.
John: Yeah, right.
John: The letter C is, it's just, it's an innocent character.
John: Why must you point at it?
Merlin: We're asking the letter C to do a lot of heavy lifting already.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because sometimes it's a C, sometimes it's a K, sometimes it's got a Cedilla.
John: Yep, sometimes it's a Ch, sometimes it's a S. Mm-hmm.
John: There's a lot going on.
John: But yeah, so they barricaded themselves in the post office and they fought the Germans for a long time.
John: But then this was the bummer of it.
John: The Germans decided that they were not, what was it?
John: They weren't legal.
Merlin: They were declared in court martial.
Merlin: This is on Wikipedia, so it has to be, right?
Merlin: Sentenced to death by a German court martial as, quote unquote, illegal combatants.
John: That's it.
Merlin: A little over a month later.
John: Because they were not – this is how we keep all these people in Guantanamo.
John: We decide that they are illegal.
John: They did not have a legal right to fight us.
John: If they were legally authorized to fight us – Well, that would be complicated.
John: If they were wearing a uniform and it had a button on it that had the name of a country –
John: Then they're legal and then you can't just put them in a shipping container and leave them in the hot sun for a year.
John: You have to deal with them as like a representative of their state.
John: Almost like a person.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You don't have to do that.
John: If they're illegal, then you can treat them just like a warthog that you found in the forest.
Merlin: That's a lot less paperwork.
Merlin: As a frequent viewer of Wikipedia pages on battles, you will know that one of the features of a Wikipedia page, this is easily the most fascinating part of this page, over on the right rail where they give you the details of the battle.
Merlin: You've got the belligerents, the commanders, casualties and losses.
Merlin: And so you've got a column for one side, a column for the other.
Merlin: On the one side, you've got Poland.
Merlin: On the other side, you've got Nazi Germany.
Merlin: And then under Strength...
Merlin: you have a description of who participated in the battle.
Merlin: This is amazing.
Merlin: On the Nazi side, you had more than 200 SS and SA.
Merlin: You had the people in black uniforms, people in the brown shirts, 200 SS and SA soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries, and regulars, plus three plus ADGZ armored cars.
Merlin: You know what they had on the other side?
Merlin: 55 postmen and civilians and one railway man.
LAUGHTER
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: And they creamed them.
John: Don't talk about the postman.
Merlin: The postman's ruled.
Merlin: I cannot believe this.
Merlin: The Nazis had 10 killed, 25 wounded.
Merlin: And then out of there, 200 people.
Merlin: And on the side of the post office, he had six killed.
Merlin: Two after surrendering, 14 wounded.
Merlin: And then 38 executed in captivity.
John: Talk about being a sore loser.
John: That's pretty shitty, right?
John: 38 executed in captivity.
John: Well, that's not hard to do.
John: They're in captivity.
John: That doesn't count.
John: You know, the funny thing about the Poles in World War II is a lot of them got executed, both by the Nazis and the Soviets.
John: They were just getting executed right and left because people were – people on both sides there were afraid of the valiant –
John: Poles.
John: They were valiant.
Merlin: Didn't the Poles have a famously rich history of, I don't know, dignified military service?
Merlin: Didn't they have a pretty badass army given the size of it?
Merlin: Yeah, there was a— Not only a huge army, but very committed people.
John: And they were part of that Prussian idea of the—
John: The officer class was derived from the first families of the region, right?
Merlin: They weren't just picking up scraps.
Merlin: I mean, this is considered a very honorable way to live and die for your country.
John: Yeah, and it wasn't a meritocracy in principle, right?
John: The idea was that the gentry, the rich families and the royal families also produced the best military minds.
John: Like it was – I mean it's the way people used to think.
John: And what's amazing is if you look at the leadership, like some of the best generaling, some of the best generalship of that war came from these guys whose fathers were generals, their grandfathers were generals, their great-grandfathers were generals.
John: And –
John: And you go like, wow, that's, I mean, imagine growing up in a family where it's just presumed, not that you're going to go into the army, but that you will one day be a general and lead your men into battle.
John: And that's your whole career is, when you're 20 years old, it begins with this like, well, here's the next generation.
Merlin: generation of our leader leadership class but but then of course preceded by 20 years of this is going to be a thing that you do you're just you're watching how how dad and uh uncle uh uncle uncle flawed or whatever are dealing with this stuff this is like this is this is what we do this is we are not cobblers we are not coopers we are not fletchers we are we are men who lead in war right we are the vons and the and the um or whatever else i guess the vons
John: But they – yeah, right.
John: You're sitting in the front yard playing with swords made out of little sticks and the staff car pulls up or the carriage pulls up and the czar gets out.
John: They're marching around with their big plumes in their hats.
John: It's a lot of pressure.
John: It's a big deal but also some really good gendering.
John: came out of it.
John: I mean, some shitty generally, too.
John: Let's be honest.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, you know, it's always going to be a mixed bag.
Merlin: Oh, what a horrible war.
Merlin: But anyway, so back to... Oh, so you're driving into the podcast.
John: Back to the methadone clinic.
Merlin: And just for what... I don't want to let this pass.
Merlin: There hasn't been a good point to jump in.
Merlin: I'm also extremely grateful for the podcast.
Merlin: That will not be interesting to our listeners, but I wanted to reciprocate that.
Merlin: I look forward to this.
John: No, it's very good.
Merlin: Enough said.
John: It's very good, but I... So I go past the...
John: I go past the methadone clinic and I'm thinking, you know, what's my take here?
John: This happens every time, so I've never mentioned it before because I didn't want to sit and talk about the methadone clinic.
John: But because there are a lot of – there's a lot going on there.
John: There's a lot going on there for me.
John: There's a lot going on there for all of them.
John: But it has struck me repeatedly that we're doing it wrong somehow.
John: And I don't know – I've been churning on it.
Mm-hmm.
John: I don't know how to do it better, but it seems like our current approach, and by current I mean for the last 30 years, approach to...
John: I don't even know if I wanted to.
Merlin: Hang on, because I've been waiting because I wanted to jump in and ask questions about this, if I may, because I'm interested in this, too.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I'm trying not to become a one issue person about this, about the utter desolation, the utter just crumbling of the city in which I live.
Merlin: Because it's bad.
Merlin: It's bad.
Merlin: And I've had a little miniature rant about this on the program I did with Dan a few weeks ago.
Merlin: It is really awful what's happening here.
Merlin: And, I mean, for example, just as recently as Sunday, Daddy-Daughter Day, as is often the case, my daughter and I go downtown to have lunch and see a movie and, you know, buy a book and stuff like that, buy a thermos, you know, Daddy-Daughter stuff.
John: Sure.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Did you guys recently buy a thermos?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: We bought three thermoses.
John: Do you need advice?
Merlin: Because I can tell you right now what thermos to go buy.
John: See, I don't want to take you off of your story.
John: Oh, no.
Merlin: I got a stake in the ground here.
Merlin: I'm good.
John: Go ahead.
John: Let's pull over to the side here and talk about thermoses for a second.
Merlin: Give me your knowledge.
Merlin: I have a daughter in school who's a wonderful, wonderful human being, but she's very forgetful.
Merlin: The days of having a water bottle for her that she takes to school are over.
Merlin: We now have approximately six water bottles, of which two to four may be available in the house, maybe at a given time.
Merlin: I finally got smart and realized we need to have a couple cheap ones, a couple nice ones.
Merlin: Eventually, we'll maybe find them in Lost and Found.
Merlin: In the case of her fleece, it had been on the playground for a week, and we found it.
Ha!
Merlin: My wife walked past a black fuzzy lump with dirt on it, and that was the fleece that my daughter was pretty sure she had left somewhere.
Merlin: The missing fleece.
Merlin: So we tried different ones.
John: So it was the golden fleece, basically.
Merlin: Excellent.
Merlin: I tried one.
Merlin: I just said, piss on a spark plug, right?
Merlin: I'm just going to try one out.
Merlin: So I looked at some different ones.
Merlin: And one of my frustrations, my wife is not a big icer.
Merlin: I put a lot of ice in the thermos or the thing because I figure what happens, two things happen.
Merlin: First of all, whatever's in there will tend to get warm.
Merlin: And when ice gets kind of warm, it changes and it turns into water.
Merlin: So there's a benefit of putting mostly a ton of ice in there and some water.
Merlin: And with your average run of the mill B minus or so, you know, water conveyance that will turn into what is just cool water by the end of the day.
Merlin: Cool, cool water.
Merlin: Cool, cool water.
Merlin: Give me some water.
Merlin: Shot a man on the Mexican border.
Merlin: Eduardo De Niro.
Merlin: And so just one I tried for fun because it had Batman on it and she wanted it was the Thermos brand.
Merlin: This is not an endorsement.
Merlin: Tweets are not endorsements.
Merlin: I speak only for myself.
John: Thermos brand.
Merlin: Thermos brand fun-tainer.
Merlin: The thermos brand Funtainer is probably about two inches in diameter, not a wide thermos.
John: Oh, so small.
Merlin: Yeah, but it's probably about eight inches high.
Merlin: It's got a pop top and a little straw thing, and it's made of aluminum but with insulation.
Merlin: It's insulated aluminum.
Merlin: This is not your father's thermos, by which I mean our thermos.
Merlin: This is not the kind of thermos with glass that literally breaks plat atrocities.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: This is a Batman thermos fun-tainer.
Merlin: And you get it, and the first day I had it, I'm going to tell you the truth, I put way too much ice in it.
Merlin: I put the water in.
Merlin: I capped it.
Merlin: Miraculously, end of the first day of school, she still has it.
Merlin: I'm unloading her backpack full of garbage, and I take it out, and guess what?
Merlin: It's still half full of ice.
Merlin: It's still after six hours or so.
Merlin: It still had ice in it.
Merlin: My endorsement is for you to try the thermos brand Funtainer.
Merlin: It varies in price based on whether it has My Little Pony or Avengers or Batman or what have you.
Merlin: But this is a thermos I can feel good about.
Merlin: It takes a beating.
Merlin: You pay a little more for it.
Merlin: But it's a good thermos.
Merlin: I would put this in the small bag.
John: It's a Funtainer, and I like to – this is a thing that we've been struggling to describe our – what we provide people, the service we provide people, and I would like to say that it is – I would like to say it was in Funtainment.
John: Huh.
John: Oh, that really works for me.
John: It's really what we're doing here.
John: And yet the fun-tainer, I mean, what is the podcast if not a fun-tainer for our in-fun-tainment?
Merlin: You can get one that looks like R2-D2, Ninja Turtles, Princesses.
Merlin: So yeah, check that out.
Merlin: I think it's a good one.
Merlin: But you're going to get into this more as she goes places where neither of you are.
Merlin: Mm hmm.
Merlin: And everything disappears.
Merlin: It's not interesting.
Merlin: This is not fun.
Merlin: This is not this is not fun.
Merlin: Tainment.
Merlin: The reality is that everything you buy goes away and the child has no idea that it maybe even ever existed.
Merlin: It might be in lost and found, you know, but no, it's just she will.
Merlin: And then one day she'll come home.
Merlin: She's got four water bottles that she found.
John: Well, so I send my daughter to school with the water bottles that we have collected from the XOXO Festival.
Merlin: Oh, nice.
John: And so she sees XOXO as her – that's her brand of water bottle.
Merlin: Did you have any problems with leakage?
Merlin: There were some people on the Entitlement Channel and XOXO who were complaining about that the water bottles were leaking and they wanted to redress.
John: Oh, leakage.
John: Their free water bottles were leaking.
John: Yeah.
John: Not going to get into it.
John: I felt like, I feel like, no, that brand of water containment vehicle is solid.
John: I'm not worried about it.
Merlin: I think it's a clean, is it called Clean Teen?
Merlin: Is that the brand name?
John: I don't know.
John: I'm so bad with brands.
John: Yeah, brands.
John: You know what?
John: That's one of the things that I'm most ashamed of.
John: I'm so bad at remembering brands.
Merlin: Pounce sign brands.
John: But a good friend of mine, a very close friend of mine the other day, showed up with a new thermos.
John: And it was a Stanley brand thermos.
Merlin: That's a good-ass thermos.
Merlin: The green, the big green classic?
Merlin: The big green classic.
Merlin: I got life hacks on how to use one of those.
Merlin: That is a great thermos.
John: Yeah, the thing is three feet tall.
John: It looks like a howitzer shell.
John: And she plops it down in front of me and she was like, I got this the other day, thought you might appreciate it.
John: And I was just like trying to contain the covetousness I felt for this giant thermos.
John: And I was just like, I don't even care about your thermos.
John: And she was like, I don't believe you.
John: I think that you like this thermos.
John: And I was like, no, not interested.
John: Actually, frankly, I was just going to go drink some something out of a plastic water bottle.
Merlin: Don't care.
Merlin: Probably going to forget about in a second.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, she was like, neener, neener, neener.
John: And then as soon as she left the room, I was just all over this thermos, checking it out with its little cup.
Merlin: The cup.
Merlin: You know what the key is?
Merlin: You probably know.
Merlin: Here's the key to the green Stanley Classic thermos is before you put your coffee in it, you know what you put in it?
Merlin: Oh, hot water.
Merlin: Boiling water.
Merlin: You put in boiling water.
Merlin: This is physics, John.
Merlin: This is basic physics.
Merlin: You fill that thing with fucking hot water and have it sit there for minutes, minutes, minutes, minutes, minutes.
Merlin: What I would do before I went to bed at night, I would fill it with boiling water and close it.
Merlin: In the morning, you throw out the boiling water.
Merlin: You put in your piping hot coffee.
Merlin: You're going to have coffee until 8 p.m.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: It might be a little cool, but that's an outstanding.
Merlin: The old school thermos is old school technology.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and what was astonishing about it as I was looking, I was measuring it with my eyes, you know, and imagining how much coffee you could put in this thing.
John: Not as much as you'd think.
John: Oh, is that right?
Merlin: Well, it's got thick walls, but it's got a handle and a cup.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, God, it's so great.
Merlin: I'm sorry I interrupted you.
John: No, no, I interrupted you because you and your daughter were on your way downtown to have father-daughter day.
Merlin: Yeah, Daddy Daughter Day.
Merlin: And it was great.
Merlin: We went and we saw the re-release of Iron Giant with new scenes in it.
Merlin: Outstanding.
Merlin: I cried and cried.
Merlin: It was great.
Merlin: We have popcorn.
Merlin: But, you know, even just... Wait a minute.
John: New scenes in Iron Giant?
John: Like scenes where they're on the French plantation or something?
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: It's like an apocalypse giant.
Merlin: There's two new scenes, one of which you will hardly notice unless you're very familiar with the film.
Merlin: And another of which...
Merlin: depending on your own theories or reckons about the movie and in particular about the origin of the giant, could change a lot.
Merlin: It's pretty much exactly, it clarifies what's up with the giant.
John: So like a CGI Jabba the Hutt walks onto the screen and tells you the backstory of...
Merlin: CGI Harrison Ford comes out and narrates it.
Merlin: Shoots him first and then explains.
Merlin: We call them skin jobs.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, that's exciting.
Merlin: I'm going to tell you this.
Merlin: Big screen.
Merlin: I'm going to tell you this.
Merlin: I'm not going to spoil it for you.
Merlin: So you've seen this film.
Merlin: One of my favorite movies.
Merlin: He's at Dean's scrapyard.
Merlin: He goes and stays there.
Merlin: 37 minutes later, he knocks on the door again.
Merlin: And finally, the giant ends up spending the night sleeping outside.
Merlin: Remember, Hogarth said goodbye to him and leaves.
Merlin: New scene, all I'm going to say, Iron Giant has a dream.
John: What?
Merlin: Yeah, and it's broadcast on the TV inside that Dean is watching.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: So we get to see his dream because, you know, he's an electronic robot.
John: Sure, of course.
Merlin: If you're off air, if you want, I'll spoil it for you by telling you what's in the dream.
John: This is the question that we've been asking for years.
John: Did he dream of electric sheep?
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Well, all we know, we know he had the bump in his head, which seemed to make him forget that he may actually be a gun.
Merlin: But then you remember at the end, he knocks out that little, because they start pulling guns on him.
Merlin: He knocks out that little bump and gets all happy-go-jappy with the gun stuff.
John: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Merlin: God, what an outstanding movie.
Merlin: Oh, my God, what a good movie.
John: It was such a surprise the first time I saw it.
Merlin: I was unprepared.
Merlin: Utterly unprepared for how good that movie was.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: Went into watching it with a kind of like, oh, fucking der.
Merlin: Three syllables still make me cry.
Merlin: Superman.
Superman.
Merlin: Breaks my heart.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: I bitch.
Merlin: When I'm not actually sitting in front of the movie, I bitch about the ending because I think the ending intellectually feels tacked on.
Merlin: In my head, the movie should stop at the point when they're hanging out and we see that Dean and Annie are a couple and they've got the statue and little Hogarth says how he misses the giant.
Merlin: In my head, that's where the movie should stop.
Merlin: Then, of course, it ends.
Merlin: Not to spoil it for anyone, but it ends with certain implications about what happened to the giant.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: Every intellectual bone in my body just melts when I actually see that ending and I bawl.
Merlin: And I think it's perfect.
Merlin: I'm at war, literally at war with myself.
John: Yeah, you think about it after the fact and it doesn't comport with your narrative.
Merlin: The music is swelling and the camera is flying through and that dumb typeface they chose says Iceland and it's flying through and then you see the face and you're like, oh my god.
Merlin: I'm going to cry right now.
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Merlin: So we're going downtown.
Merlin: We get off.
Merlin: We go down.
Merlin: And, like, you know, just getting from Powell Street Station to the Metreon, it's like, ah...
Merlin: First of all, on the trip there, there was a clearly – what's the proper term now?
Merlin: A schizophrenic man.
Merlin: A man who got on the train and sat right next to my daughter, cross-legged on the floor, pulling his hair and making a high-pitched noise while he put his fingers in his ears.
Merlin: Like a guy who's obviously having like a schizophrenic episode.
Merlin: Like that's happening, like right next to my kid.
Merlin: She's super mellow about it.
Merlin: We get off.
Merlin: We see another guy trying to break a window with his elbow, screaming at nobody.
Merlin: We see another guy who's screaming at tourists at the corner of – or just passers-by at the corner of like Mission and Fifth and just screaming.
Merlin: And as we make our way past that, we're about to make the turn, go over to Target, and there's a man – there's an African-American man sobbing as he walks down the middle of Fifth Street like he's having some kind of an Old Testament experience.
Merlin: Like it's – I mean the kind of thing where like you remember something like that from being a kid and seeing it once and she saw like four things like that in about 15 minutes.
Merlin: And that's what's happening at the street level right now.
John: Welcome to San Francisco.
Merlin: Welcome to San Francisco.
Merlin: It's very fancy.
Merlin: We've got a lot of startups.
Merlin: It's a hell of a place.
Merlin: And then of course the poop, which is just literally everywhere.
John: Billions and billions and billions of dollars pouring into San Francisco every hour.
Merlin: It's being poured into buckets that just some people never see.
Merlin: And what happens when the money gets poured into those buckets that they don't see has invisible ramifications within weeks and months.
Merlin: So now, I mean, I'll just put it into one statement.
Merlin: Everybody can understand.
Merlin: Now white people are being evicted.
Merlin: And that's changed everything.
Merlin: So there's just notices going up everywhere for like, yeah, well, here's the thing.
Merlin: I just decided to triple your rent.
Merlin: So your rent's $17,000 a month now, and that's just a thing.
Merlin: So three days or quit, that kind of thing.
Merlin: So yeah, that's happening everywhere.
Merlin: I just saw a notice on a place down the street from where I am, a three-day or quit notice for a guy who owes $343,000.
Merlin: I'll send you the picture.
Merlin: $343,000 in back rent on a place.
Yeah.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Yeah, so anyway, that's happening.
Merlin: Here's my question for you.
Merlin: And this is where it gets back to the methadone.
Merlin: See, there's something I've been thinking about.
Merlin: I think when you're a person of, one way to put it is like a fortunate person.
Merlin: Another way to put it might be a privileged person, however you want to think of it.
Merlin: People who are not currently in a state of...
Merlin: dire duress or who have never been faced with direness and duress tend to think kind of digitally.
Merlin: Like you think in terms of, let's say, haves and have-nots.
Merlin: Or you think of people who are upstanding citizens and junkies.
Merlin: Or you think in all these terms that are very digital.
Merlin: You think of like people who are criminals or, you know, citizens or however you want to think about it.
Merlin: And like I started thinking in my head the phrase I have never uttered till this moment is like the ladder of desperation.
Merlin: That there are so many – it's probably not even a ladder.
Merlin: It's probably more than one axis.
Merlin: But that's what – I'm very interested in methadone because most of us who are whatever on the good side of that, the white side of all those things, look down and say, oh, here's the heroin addict that we saw in our health books in eighth grade.
Merlin: We know about the heroin addict who's addicted on the heroin.
Merlin: And then over here, you've got the person who now has written a bestselling book about how they got off heroin or whatever.
Merlin: But like the methadone is super interesting to me because it seems like that's on one of the lower rungs of the ladder of desperation.
Merlin: But like, what is, what is methadone?
Merlin: How does methadone get introduced into a person's life?
Merlin: Do they want it?
Merlin: Are they glad they're having it?
Merlin: Are they, are they happy they're off the heroin?
Merlin: Is methadone, you know what?
Merlin: Just school me on this.
Merlin: Cause I, I've never, you go in, you get a cup.
Merlin: I remember first seeing this in Vancouver, you get your methadone.
Merlin: It,
Merlin: emulates some of the effects of heroin without like what is the deal with methadone how does it figure in the life of somebody who is not currently taking heroin methadone is a synthetic opioid opioid
John: And it's like, so you've got your hair when you're on your up and down.
John: You're going, you're getting high and then you're getting low.
John: You're getting high, you're getting low.
John: And you develop a kind of tolerance for the drug and you're not getting as high anymore.
John: But you're getting lower and lower.
John: And you want to get off the heroin.
John: And so if you take the heroin away and don't – and just take it away, then you have bad withdrawals and you see – Is it really like – it's like train spotting.
Merlin: Like you get extremely sick, right?
John: Yeah, you see a robot baby walking on the ceiling.
John: You do – it's terrible.
John: And it's also physical.
John: Like you can – I mean you can –
Merlin: die from withdrawals you can actually like it can be so bad I remember when I first heard I'll probably mangle this a little bit but first hearing like yeah you know you can be psychologically addicted to marijuana you can be an alcoholic you can get addicted to cocaine but everybody says opioids and heroin is very different because I don't know if it changes your cell structure but it does something physical to you where you do actually need heroin in order to not feel sick yeah it's the truest like it's the truest addiction
John: And so what methadone does is it goes in there, you take it and it goes in there and it's like a, it's a kind of, it's a slow, steady, it fills the, it fills the hole, you know, it fills up the sickness, like it keeps the sickness at bay.
John: but it doesn't get all the way to, you're not all the way to euphoria.
John: It just kind of fills in the low spots and lets you get on with getting on.
John: You're not clean by any means, but you're not on the crazy up and down cycle.
John: And then the premise is that you can slowly reduce the amount of methadone
John: until you are off it.
John: And you can, you know, you kind of can't slowly wean yourself off of heroin quite the same way.
John: But with methadone, you put it in there and then you just over time start less and less and less and you can just sort of coast to the ground.
John: If you're also practicing the premise that you're, you know, if you're doing all the other hard work of trying to live in the straight world,
John: But a lot of people get on methadone and they just stay on it for years because they never quite – they don't actually want to quite coast to the –
John: all the way to the ground you know it's a it's a it's an interim there are a lot of schools of thought on this you want to get off a heroin and there are you know there are those people that like go chain themselves to a bed somewhere and say no matter what you hear come through this door don't open it don't unlock this door no matter what I say and then and you know and that happens to a lot of people that get sent to jail right they they come down the hard way and then there's this other way which is like
John: Under the supervision of a clinic, you kind of get the slow coast.
John: But you have to be doing...
John: For it to work, you have to be doing all this other work.
John: You can't just go in and get your – and I've known a lot of people who go in and get – There must be behavioral and just who you hang with.
Merlin: There must be so many changes beyond just filling up.
Merlin: It sounds like you're saying methadone fills up or ameliorates the extreme physical problems that not taking heroin.
Merlin: But it also – it takes the edge off a little bit.
Merlin: Not as much as obviously getting the heroin.
Merlin: But it's not fun, but it's something.
Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, you know, I think it's not – I think it's not like super unfun, but it's not – you know, you're not like getting the mega fly.
John: But you can just sit and take your methadone and still like –
John: Um, and still be living the life.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like maybe you're not, maybe you're not shooting up, but you are, you're, you're, you're also not, um, on the straight and narrow.
John: And, um,
John: So what I started thinking about is like why – what is it about us where we want people to be on the straight and narrow?
John: What is it about us as a collective – as a people –
John: That we, as you say, approach it from such a digital binary idea.
John: Right.
John: Like the amount of money we pour, not just money but effort, emotional effort, like energy, focus, that we pour into the notion that we want people to get clean.
John: And in the meantime –
John: If they're not clean, we're not going to provide any services to them.
John: We're going to exclude them from life.
John: We're going to push them onto the street.
John: We're going to insist that they be kept out such that they –
John: They're forced to rob to support their habits.
John: They're living in squalor.
John: They're spreading disease among themselves.
John: You know, we absolutely exclude them if they are getting high.
John: And this isn't addressing the mental health problem, which we approach in a similar vein.
Merlin: Yep, absolutely.
Merlin: Absolutely.
John: Where it's just like, you are not taking your medication, you are not undergoing treatment, therefore you are absolutely excluded.
John: And then we seem to be content.
John: We tsk-tsk, right?
John: But we are content to see people living absolutely torturous times.
John: lives in squalor and just covered.
John: I mean, you see people every once in a while who are just covered with sores.
Merlin: Yeah, we get that a lot here.
Merlin: Meth is pretty rough on a body.
John: Oh, there are the meth sores, but there are the sores of complete hygiene failure, where you're scratching yourself and then you get...
John: It gets sores and you just are like – it's almost medieval looking.
John: Somebody walking through the center of a wealthy, prosperous city and you just have this person that seems like they're from – They look like a leper.
John: Yeah, they're from a plague-ridden time.
John: And it all kind of comes back to the idea that we have as a – like culturally –
John: which feels to me like a very Calvinist premise or a Catholic one even.
John: Yeah, that's what I was going to say, yeah.
John: Yeah, you are out.
John: You do not accept our wit.
John: You are not, you know, you don't accept the, you're not saved, and so therefore you are out.
John: And I think about like we have all this new,
John: energy, which I think of as 20th century energy, which is all these people who have decided that they are agnostics or atheists.
John: They are living in a world unburdened by mythology and by the sort of what they imagine is this, you
John: prehistoric dumbness like they've finally they've read Nietzsche and they have they've been to college they've worked at a software place for a while and they are above all this and they can see with clarity but we're still none of us saying
John: Can we eliminate this binary notion that you either – that successful people deserve their success because they worked hard and the ones that don't work hard deserve their squalor?
John: Or successful people deserve their success because of whatever other conditions you put on it.
John: But that there are all these people that just like, if they can't get up in the morning and make it to their minimum wage job, then fuck them.
John: It's crazy, and it's too bad that atheism has attached itself to libertarianism so closely, although maybe they're philosophical brethren, and so I guess it makes sense.
John: But you would hope that there would be a kind of compassionate...
John: version of this humanistic thought that we've spent the last hundred years kind of working on.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Every off-the-shelf explanation that I can come up with for why we allow this to go on or why we allow it to feel okay or – well, I'll get to this in a second – comes from –
Merlin: In my head, traces back unintentionally, unconsciously to some kind of – this is not a slam against religion, but it does go back to the ideas of religious fundamentalism of various sorts from another time.
Merlin: And that could be something from 100 years ago.
Merlin: That could be something from hundreds of years ago.
Merlin: On the one hand, there's a certain kind of basic tribalism where if there is somebody who is the other in our tribe who is not contributing, I think there's a very natural reaction of saying, well, they're the other for a reason.
Merlin: Like either they're marked –
Merlin: Or you know what I mean?
Merlin: They've received the mark.
Merlin: They're like – they're bad news.
Merlin: They're left-handed.
Merlin: Or they've done something to deserve this.
Merlin: Like God knows why they're this way.
Merlin: I'm not saying religious people today believe this.
Merlin: I'm saying this is the result of a certain kind of toxic religious sociopolitic connection over hundreds of years that we're not entirely comfortable admitting still exists to some extent.
Merlin: So one of those is that person is the way they are because reasons.
Merlin: And that's way beyond what we need to understand here.
Merlin: But obviously there's a reason why that's the way it is and I'm the way that I am.
Merlin: I think that's one really basic one.
Merlin: And there's another one.
John: There's a reason.
John: That's right.
Merlin: There's a reason, but it may be God's reason, and we don't always understand God's reasons, but these things do happen.
Merlin: As we see around us every day, there's a reason why everything happens the way it is.
Merlin: Otherwise, it wouldn't happen the way it does.
Merlin: So my good fortune is explained by the fact that God likes me, and their bad fortune is explained by the fact that they're marked for some reason.
Merlin: But then you get into other kinds of things that I think you don't have to look back more than 100 or a couple hundred years to see.
Merlin: And one of those is that why can't we have more than a digital opinion about this?
Merlin: How can we let people continue to live like that?
Merlin: I think there's something –
Merlin: Why do we have to put them in jail is one.
Merlin: Why is it that we can't help these people?
Merlin: And I can't trace it to any specific religion or denomination exactly without being overly dramatic.
Merlin: But I think there is something to saying that if this person wanted to be saved, they know the path.
Merlin: Like they have chosen – like let's say they had bad fortune, right?
Merlin: Maybe luck didn't smile on them.
Merlin: Well, they have had ample opportunities to understand how to be part of our culture.
Merlin: And because there's something, A, fundamentally wrong with them probably, but B, also that they refuse to convert.
Merlin: They are living on the streets and in that condition because they haven't converted.
Merlin: And if they converted, we would be able to help them.
Merlin: It's just that maybe they have weak character.
Merlin: Maybe they – whatever.
Merlin: But even if you're a slightly more advanced idiot, you would look at that and go, well, there's still a reason why that's the way they are.
Merlin: And really you can come all the way up into the say no to drugs era to show just the fundamental misunderstandings about how we treat people –
Merlin: And we're talking about a lot here.
Merlin: We're talking about disease.
Merlin: We're talking about poverty.
Merlin: We're talking about class.
Merlin: We're talking about drug abuse or substance abuse writ large.
Merlin: But, I mean, it would take five shows to talk about this, but there's this part in my gut that goes, you change just a couple dates and nouns and titles in this, and it really does – it sounds a lot like something from the 1600s, that this person cannot be allowed to be part of this group because –
Merlin: because they have not converted to what the group needs them to do.
Merlin: Therefore, they are now the other, and they are dangerous, and spending resources on them would not only be a waste of the resources, but it would be antithetical to the laws that govern how we work together.
John: Yeah, we're – I mean we are – we're still Charlemagne taking the Saxons down to the river and cutting off their heads if they don't do the one right version of –
John: of life that we have, that we have in mind.
John: And, and, and the, the, the, you know, secular humanism has not done away with that idea.
John: So I drive past this methadone clinic and I start to imagine, I start to imagine a world in which we say,
John: If you want to do heroin, that's fine.
John: And we have determined through exhaustive studies that the amount of money – what masks it somewhat is that the amount of money we spend –
John: on this whole problem.
John: It's dispersed among thousands of sort of organizations that don't really communicate with each other.
John: And we're not able to say that the cost of the war on drugs, let's call it,
John: is not just the amount of money that we pay the Coast Guard to go out and interdict boats that are coming in from the Bahamas.
John: Like we can put a cost on the war on drugs in terms of like –
John: It costs a lot of money for those C-130s to be flying over Central America with their downward-looking radar.
John: But the cost of the war on drugs is actually like also all of these ambulances that we are constantly schlepping people back and forth from emergency rooms, all of the jail time, all of the cops just focused on drug problems, all of the cost of –
John: breaking and entering and purse snatching and you know and just like you you there's no way to look at what the real costs are but you can do you can get close if you just expand your vision and say like holy shit this is bleeding us in a way and also not solving the problem
John: So, okay, you want to do heroin.
John: You're a person who's like discovered heroin and it feels good.
John: And that's the first problem.
John: We don't like people to feel good.
John: But so here's what, here's what we have for you.
John: We have a, we have this, we have a farm, beautiful farm.
John: It's a big farm and it encompasses hundreds of acres.
John: There are a lot, we've built lots of buildings there and it's heroin farm.
Yeah.
John: And you go there and you're on heroin there.
John: And we don't ask you to pay any money.
John: We don't require that you do anything.
John: You're a living person and you can go to this place and be on heroin.
John: And there's enough of a medical staff there that we don't let you do.
John: die.
John: Although, you know, this is a kind of a, it's a form of being away.
John: You're certainly away, but the cost of maintaining this for what is really a pretty small proportion of people who want to be on heroin is
John: it's just worth it.
John: It's just worth it for us that you not be... It's worth it for us that you not be causing problems in the town, but it's also like this is much easier.
John: You're going to be on heroin anyway if you're living in a tent under the freeway or if you're living in this...
John: Hotel.
Merlin: Is this kind of like Bunny Colvin's, what is it called, Hamsterdam in the wire?
John: It's a little Hamsterdam-y, but Hamsterdam, you know, still.
Merlin: It's more about selling and consuming.
John: I mean, it kept the squalor from like infecting the city.
John: It was more of a containment strategy.
Merlin: Yeah, we'll take it out of the high rises and move it over to Hamsterdam.
Merlin: And now you do what you want in this, you know, on this island of lost souls and you will not get arrested.
John: Yeah, but also what it does is, you know, there's a huge – the thing about drug addicts, right, is that they have – they're not – they do share a lot of characteristics with one another and some of those characteristics are –
John: like alcoholics and drug addicts are selfish people and they are uh they're egotistical people like there's a there's a lot of commonality it's why alcoholics anonymous works is because they have identified the fact that every single alcoholic and drug addict feels like they're a special person they really all do um there's a kind of there's a there is a
John: There is a lot of commonality in the way that alcoholics and drug addicts think, which is what makes it seem like a spiritual disease.
John: And it's why we despise them so much, right?
John: Because very seldom does a person of true humility say,
John: become a raging alcoholic.
John: Either the alcohol turns them into an asshole or they were an asshole to begin with.
John: And that's something that even in AA meetings, there's a lot of debate about.
John: You know, were you an asshole and then you were born an asshole and then became an alcoholic because that's what happens?
Merlin: It's like douchebags in business development.
Merlin: It seems like one was invented for the other.
Merlin: Right, right.
John: Which came first?
John: It's hard to know, chicken or the egg?
John: And so that's part of the reason that we don't want to – that we can't imagine just caring for them somewhere because they infuriate us.
John: Like each individual alcoholic comes from a family that they have infuriated to the point that they've been kicked out.
John: Every junkie was already infuriating before they became a junkie.
John: But so if you built this farm and you were like, you want to go sit on a couch all day and nod off –
John: You know, yeah, that's fine.
John: We'll have TVs there, three squares a day.
John: It's going to cost money.
John: It costs the town money to sustain you there.
John: But and it's very hard for some people in the town to imagine that you guys are out here eating three squares a day.
Merlin: Intolerable.
John: Just intolerant.
John: It's going to drive them to absolute distraction.
John: What did you do to deserve this?
John: There are people working hard.
Merlin: I wish I could sit around and be addicted to heroin all day.
John: Sure.
John: Why the fuck?
John: Why can't I be addicted to heroin?
John: And the thing is, you can.
John: It's open enrollment.
John: And what you discover is that people don't want to.
John: 99.9% of the people do not want to be addicted to heroin sitting on a couch nodding off.
John: They just don't.
John: If you said it's free and you can do it,
John: Most people wouldn't include, you know, including some junkies.
John: They'd go out there.
John: They'd live for a year.
John: They'd be like, wow, this is amazing.
John: And then they, too, would say, you take away the thrill of persecution.
John: You take away all the energy of the hunt and the feeling of being hunted and
John: And that's a thing that we never talk about.
John: And it's very hard to talk about.
John: The feeling that I had as an alcoholic and the thing that was sort of propelling me toward a life on the street, which was a big part of my early 20s.
John: Like, you know, I was dancing with...
John: The idea of being a street person, I spent a lot of time sort of seeking out the wisdom of the alley and wondering whether or not I belonged there.
John: And a big, big part of it was this idea of like the truth of it.
John: And when we talk about, from a public health standpoint, when we talk about junkies and alcoholics and we think, you know, problematic street ones, and these are not, this is separate from mental health problems.
Merlin: Which is very difficult to do, but, you know, to have the conversation, you do have to separate it.
John: Yeah, there's a lot of overlap.
John: But a big part of that overlap is like,
John: You know, how many of where at what point do these ideas trend over into mental illness?
John: And it isn't a clear there isn't a clear line between bipolar two and bipolar one.
John: you know there isn't a clear line there's a clear schizophrenia is like okay yeah hello you are having a full-on schizophrenic episode but the bass player of rage against the machine believes that we did not land on the moon
John: So much that he is willing to confront Buzz Aldrin in the public square and yell at him about the fact that we faked the moon landing.
John: And if he believes so strongly that we faked the moon landing, he has to believe in a whole castle of prior notions about how the world is actually transacted.
John: that we faked the moon landing right then he also believes that we have that there's a secret government that is in thrall to who knows what but is he a schizophrenic he sounds like one but he's the base player of rage against the machine and he lives in a house and he has money and you know like where where is the line between him and a guy who's standing on the street corner pulling his hair saying that we fake the moon landing
John: So the idea of like – and junkies aside, we have one here in Seattle, a housing complex for chronic alcoholics where they are allowed to drink.
John: And we finally built it because it was just like these guys, they're released from the emergency room.
John: They go immediately to the first package store and buy a bottle of MD-2020.
John: And then they're passed out again in a dumpster and they're back in the emergency room in 24 hours.
John: Let's just put them all in a building.
John: And we did and it's been an amazing success.
John: But there's a waiting list of thousand years for this thing.
John: So what do you do if you just, what happens if you build a really nice or you take over some old Catholic retreat or some old high school somewhere and you just say, this is going to be a place where people can just go.
John: The downstairs is going to be a beer stube.
John: And it's not going to be squalid.
John: We're going to clean it up.
John: We're going to have TVs that are playing sports ball.
John: And you can come and there's just beer.
John: There's just free beer there.
John: Beer is cheap to make.
John: And there's lots and lots of shitty beer that beer companies would donate.
John: And just remove the – and again, all the outcry.
John: Oh, I'd like to just sit around all day and drink beer.
John: Well, fine.
John: Here it is.
John: You know, like go for it.
John: You have a sort of monastic cell that is yours.
Merlin: Yeah, you don't have to fill out a form to go to the soup kitchen.
Merlin: It's just that you would probably prefer to go somewhere else.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And you would prefer ultimately not to live in a very small room with a bathroom down the hall and just –
Merlin: You're getting all these assumptions behind stuff that we rarely prod at too, too much.
Merlin: So – and I mean I guess the closest thing I think of a phrase like sunk cost fallacy.
Merlin: It would be a dishonor to all the people who died in Iraq and Afghanistan to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It would dishonor them so much.
Merlin: All the people who died in this horrible war, we have to show them honor by having more people die in this horrible war.
Merlin: And there's the less emotional versions of this, which are things like there's this car that I probably should have sold five years ago, and now I have to decide whether to put in a new timing belt.
Merlin: Well, I just got the air conditioning fixed.
Merlin: So I should probably get the timing belt fixed.
Merlin: On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense.
Merlin: On the other hand, that's really not very sensible.
Merlin: So if you go in and you go like look at – I mean it's – and this really is kind of like the wire writ large in a lot of ways.
Merlin: I'm going to stop using that phrase writ large now.
Merlin: But if you think about everything we poured into this and what the stakes are to it not going well –
Merlin: The last thing in the world you're going to do is have a beer stoop with donated beer for people who don't quote-unquote deserve it.
Merlin: Because we have a lot invested.
Merlin: There's a lot of our own history and dignity invested in this idea of this thing being a terrible thing.
Merlin: All of those planes that we're using and all of those resources that are being used to fight this war without asking the really dumb John Roderick question of like, well, what if –
Merlin: What if this weren't – what if we hadn't made this into a criminal enterprise?
Merlin: We look at it as a criminal enterprise now.
Merlin: Well, why was heroin illegal?
Merlin: Because we don't like Chinese people.
Merlin: That's why heroin is illegal, right?
Merlin: Let's go way back to why a whole bunch of stuff is illegal because white guys didn't like the people who were doing it.
Merlin: And then now today – well, how are we doing with that?
Merlin: So, you know, but then there's the one phase which is like how do you talk people out of the criminality of all this stuff and saying like, well, maybe this shouldn't be a crime.
Merlin: But the other shoe that goes with that other foot is then what do we – then how do we treat these people as human beings if we decided they're not actually criminals?
Merlin: Both of which require a lot of walking back on previous philosophies and a lot of –
Merlin: essentially eating crow about something that you used to have a real strong feeling about.
Merlin: And there's not that many people in a position of power who want to be the one to put up the beer stube.
John: Right, right.
John: Well, like for instance, we have made pot legal here now.
John: You can go into a pot store, show your ID that you are 18, I guess, or 21.
John: I don't know what the – I've never been into one of these things.
John: I wouldn't go into a fucking gross-ass pot store.
John: But if you want to, you can.
John: Go in and they're not gross.
John: They're clean and they're beautiful.
John: And the number of pots they have exceeds the number of pots that you could imagine.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And because pot technology has had all these years, 40 years of people crossbreeding pots, there are now, I think, the general level of stoniness in the pots...
John: is like ludicrous right i mean what even when i was in high school and college there was still you could buy shake right you could sit around roll a joint out of some shake smoke pot all afternoon and get a kind of hazy cool buzz
John: It was like drinking light beer.
Merlin: I mean it was not – it's like the difference between light beer and like shotgunning Everclear.
Merlin: But even more so.
Merlin: I mean the idea of the quote-unquote one-hit shit when I was in college versus now, I can't even imagine the difference.
John: No.
John: I look at people who are baked now and I go, I know how baked you are.
John: And I've been that baked, but I'm not even sure I have.
John: You wouldn't remember it.
John: Back 20 years ago when I quit smoking pot, I had smoked all the crazy University of Washington laboratory pot.
John: I had smoked the Madness of Thunderfuck.
Merlin: Madness of Thunderfuck.
John: I had smoked the top shelf shit in, in Amsterdam, all the, you know, the Northern lights and all the, the, the, like I had sought out and found the gnarliest shit, including some black hash that I smoked in, uh, in Tarifa, Spain, which literally made me feel like I was levitating above my own body in a hotel room and
John: In Tarifa, I I had this, you know, like this experience where I could not believe it.
John: I was speaking to Mother Mary and she was speaking back to me and I was floating above my body and laughing with joy.
John: But I think you could probably get that high off a pot that you buy in just a store now.
John: I think it is too chronic.
John: It has become insane.
John: And they need to scale it back.
John: They need to breed some pot for olds.
John: They need to breed some pot for chill people who just want to smoke some weed.
John: Like 3-2 pot.
John: Some 3-2 pot, exactly.
John: But in any case, so we have these pot stores.
John: But we have very, very, we have a lot of rules about them.
John: And one of the crucial rules is no smoking pot at the pot store.
John: It's not a pot cafe.
John: It's a pot store.
John: You buy the pot.
John: It's a package store.
John: Then you take the pot away.
John: And we used to have liquor stores in Washington, which were not bars.
John: Obviously, you buy liquor at a grocery store.
John: You can't drink it there.
John: But there are also bars where you buy liquor and you drink them.
Mm-hmm.
John: You drink the liquors because you want to do that with other people.
John: You don't want to just take your bottle back to your SRO.
John: Back to your hovel.
John: Right?
John: Right.
John: But we don't because, first of all, we've made it illegal to smoke in public.
John: And pot is illegal.
John: It's smoke like tobacco.
John: But I swear to you, 90% of the people who are buying pot want to open it right there, sit down at a picnic table in a kind of dark place, order a coffee, roll a joint, smoke it, and watch the music video for Division Bell Live, Pink Floyd's
John: uh, mega light show guitar solo wank fest.
John: They want to just watch that and trip out, but not at home.
John: They want to be sitting at a table, having a coffee and somebody comes over and like, Hey man, what are you smoking?
John: You're like, I got some, some of this fucking Maui wowie man.
John: What do you got?
John: You know, they just want to be around people, but that's illegal.
John: You cannot chill.
John: Basically we have made it so you cannot chill.
John: And honestly,
John: Why?
John: I mean, I understand from a public health standpoint, you know, because the people that are serving coffee in this place would be exposed to secondhand smoke and that violates all of these.
John: municipal codes that we've established, which I agree with, right?
John: When they took cigarettes out of rock clubs, it improved my life a thousand percent as a performing artist, right?
John: You stand up on the stage and people aren't blowing Winston's in your face and you're like, fuck, this is amazing.
John: Why didn't we do this a thousand years ago?
John: But in that process, we've also made it illegal for people to go to have a bar that's like called smoking bar, right?
John: Where everybody in there just wants to smoke.
John: The bartender wants to smoke.
John: But we've eliminated that from contention.
John: You cannot choose to do that now.
Merlin: I think you can still do that in San Francisco if it's owner-operated.
Merlin: Oh, in Seattle?
Merlin: The smoking is actually an employment health law.
John: Interesting.
John: So you can choose.
Merlin: I don't know if it's still the case, but I mean, there are a couple of bars.
Merlin: There's a place called Amber in the Castro, a really fun bar that was a smoking place.
Merlin: And then not the Chieftain, but one of the other places.
Merlin: But no, that's still pretty rare.
Merlin: You could smoke weed before you can smoke a cigarette in a bar here.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and so, and I do, I smell weed in bars now more than I smell.
Merlin: I smell weed everywhere now.
Merlin: Oh God.
John: But, but if you just, if you know, if you just said like,
John: We are going to build a beer stube down in the south end of town.
John: It's going to be 40,000 square feet, a giant hall.
John: It's going to look like a beer hall in Munich.
John: Except instead of pretzels, we're going to serve fucking pieces of wedding cake or whatever it is that stoners want.
John: Right?
John: They want chocolate pudding and Mountain Dew.
John: It's been so long since I've been a stoner, I don't even remember what you want.
John: SpaghettiOs?
John: I don't know.
John: And we're going to just have – there's going to be psychedelic music playing or reggae even.
John: And you can just get baked.
John: And there are couches and stuff.
John: Like that place would be jammed.
John: Yeah.
John: But we just can't picture it.
John: And then you amp that up and say like, no, that's going to be booze, but it's going to be free.
John: It's going to be free booze.
John: The booze is going to be shitty.
John: Probably.
John: Maybe not.
John: Maybe it'll be fine.
John: I mean, but it's going to be, there's going to be just enough.
John: It's going to require a commitment on your part.
John: Like, I don't know if the commitment is you have to live there.
John: I feel like you shouldn't even have to live there.
John: I feel like there should be a farm where it's just like free beer farm.
Merlin: I think people in America don't like feeling like they're being tricked or bamboozled.
Merlin: And I think one reason people would be against anything like that is because it feels like a con.
Merlin: It feels like it's not fair.
Merlin: It feels like everybody else has to go out and work for a living.
Merlin: Why should these people get to do that?
Merlin: And it comes from the kind of person who is somewhere between a child and a parent in their mentality about the planet.
Merlin: They're enough of a child to worry about whether everything is just and they're enough of a parent to worry about whether everything is unjust.
Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm not putting that well.
Merlin: But if you actually truly cared about people, you would worry less about appearances and your own personal feelings about it and worry more about how you could actually accomplish something that's a little daring, even if it seems a little bit unusual.
John: Like if a billionaire, let's say Elon Musk.
John: Elon Musk is a great example of a billionaire.
John: Here he is, Elon Musk.
John: He's working on a Hyperloop train.
John: He's working on a spaceship.
John: He's working on... I saw a Tesla today.
John: I saw a Tesla today with a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
John: No, I saw a Tesla...
John: With those, you know, those little batons with your football team flag that you put on the back window of your car?
John: Sticking up above the car?
John: Yeah, those are terrific.
John: You have those down in San Francisco, I'm guessing.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Usually you see them.
John: Go Giants.
John: Usually you see them on a blazer.
John: that has maybe 26-inch rims.
John: But I saw them flying on a Tesla today, and I was just like, wow, right, of course.
Merlin: You have to have this installed at the factory.
Merlin: You can't just put this on yourself.
Merlin: It's like having a Mercedes or a BMW.
John: Yeah, Seahawks.
Merlin: You can't get aftermarket flags and stuff.
John: No, no, no.
John: You have to buy.
John: It's the Seahawks branded one.
John: It's like the old Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer.
John: It's embroidered on the seats.
John: They sell that for a premium.
Merlin: They put that undercoating on at the factory.
Merlin: I have to talk to my manager.
John: So Elon Musk is sitting there in his office.
John: He's trying to make the world better by building mega technology.
Merlin: Is he drinking Soylent, John, when he's doing this?
John: I think that he probably right now has an IV in.
John: It's got vitamin B complex.
John: It's got some sort of maybe some like Hitler speed.
Merlin: I see him eating a very, very tiny salad from the future that none of us have heard about.
Merlin: I'm thinking everything he does.
Merlin: Well, yeah, but like environmental chopsticks.
Merlin: They're made out of like recovered titanium.
John: Chopsticks that light up that also convert seawater to freshwater.
Yeah.
Merlin: Thank you, Elon.
Merlin: Thank you for your salad work.
John: There he is.
John: He's sitting there with his chopsticks.
John: He's talking to Scarlett Johansson, except she's just a model of Scarlett Johansson.
John: And he says, Scarlett, I'm making all these big projects.
John: I'm sending drones all around, harvesting.
John: I've invented a drone that fulfills the role of a bee in the almond industry, so we don't need bees.
John: My chopsticks are making water, so we don't need water.
John: What is my next project?
John: what do you think hologram of scarlett johansson and scarlett johansson goes that's a very interesting question elon you turn me on the little max headroom like wow and then uh she says why don't you build why don't you build a sin farm why don't you build a pleasure farm out in the desert
John: Where people can just go and it's a little bit... It's like the Polish post office in Gdansk.
John: It's an extraterritorial space where we... I mean, we're not violating any laws, but...
John: It's a chicken farm, let's say.
Merlin: It would not be as inconvenient as a boat because you could get a ship and go out into international waters.
Merlin: That's a lot of overhead for people who don't have a place to live or a job.
John: Yeah, and that's for 17th-level thetans only.
John: Mm-mm.
John: I mean, that's for – and what we're talking about is a place where even a first-level –
John: like magic user first level druids first level druids or first level mage can go and just sit at a big picnic table in a beer stoop drink some free beer smoke some gange
John: Maybe across the campus there's a place where you can shoot up and nod off or take some pills.
Merlin: It sounds a little bit like almost like a miniature kind of Disney World where there's different areas to the park with themes.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
John: There's Old West Town.
Merlin: There could be an Old West place called Horsetown where everyone's doing heroin, right?
Merlin: Obviously, you've got the old beer hall area with your beer stube in it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: The problem I think is that it would become a destination for people around the world.
Merlin: Oh, like people besides poor and deranged people would want to go there.
John: Well, or just like, yeah, people from Germany would be like, that sounds good.
John: It would kind of have to be a movement where every town would have –
John: a place every every you they would be you know they'd be a new idea in in the culture where it's just like instead of rehab facilities i mean the thing is that if you want to get off heroin and you are at one of these sin farms
John: we would also locate our methadone clinic there.
John: And so if you want to reenter society, those facilities would be there too.
John: If you want to get sober, if you want to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, if you want to rejoin society, those facilities are here and we encourage it.
John: But again, your choice.
John: If you don't, you can go back down to the lounge and
John: And so we're going to stop trying to get you to get clean by making you inhuman and we're going to offer you the opportunity to get clean if that's what you want.
Merlin: This is all still Elon Musk, right?
John: Well, I think this has gone past Elon.
John: We have to go back to introducing this conversation into the public sphere where it becomes a kind of like, you know what?
John: We've tried everything.
John: Nothing has worked.
John: It's 2015 and we are still dealing with
John: drugs and alcohol, as though it's a moral crisis.
John: And we've taken away, now talking about the mental health side of things, we no longer provide for people who cannot live within normal culture.
John: We've eliminated all services for them.
John: We won't house them anymore.
John: We won't
John: We don't care for them.
John: People that just need to be maintained.
John: The Kennedy sister lived in an institution her whole life, the one that they gave a lobotomy to.
Merlin: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: But if you're not a Kennedy, if you can't afford to be in a for-pay institution, we're just going to let you go out on the street and fend for yourself and too bad for you.
John: That's the fallout from deciding that some people were involuntarily institutionalized.
John: Now all the people that should be institutionalized, we're just going to – that's all done.
John: And we have to ask the insurance companies.
John: And the insurance companies came back and said, sorry, you had a pre-existing condition.
John: So you're going to be picking at your scabs and throwing your poo at people.
John: That's what we've decided.
John: So, you know, there's just – there is a need within human life for a place – there's a need with –
John: for the idea that some people can't care for themselves and and we don't um and we care for them without without judgment and i don't know how to introduce that idea particularly since caring for people
John: is a thing that we so often just say, well, we'll let the religious people deal with that.
John: We'll let the compassion industry deal with that.
John: And the compassion industry is made up of religious people with a very strong sense of judgment and then all the kind of methadone clinic people who are medical, who have a medical approach to it, but still premised on the idea that we are trying to get you
John: We're trying to get you from there to here, right?
John: And there's a success or failure rate.
John: Right.
John: There's definitely a specific part of the theme park that they would prefer you go to.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You're headed out of the theme park is where they want you to go.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And sometimes I think if I were Elon Musk, maybe I would go to the state of Nebraska where no one wants to live anymore.
John: The state of Nebraska, which largely should be returned to a prairie state where all the fences are taken down and the buffalo are allowed to roam free.
John: And there are still some old people in Bausch and Loam horn-rimmed glasses who are standing in the center of their empty town.
John: railing against the federal government and, uh, you know, just like continuing to paint quite a picture, continuing to farm soybeans, even as the giant robot combines, uh,
John: move just like the robot combines have a glitch in their gps and they just combine right over their farmhouse and there's not and the operator is somewhere in chicago nobody even i'm talking about the future now at some point i i lost you a few minutes ago turned into a beat poem but i like where it's going somehow broke down taking down for the buffalo to rome malach malach
John: I remember you, Walt Whitman, coming down to my beer stube.
John: I saw the best minds of my generation combined by a robot.
John: Hysterical naked theme park, Elon Musk.
John: So what if you went there and there are lots and lots of people who want to go up to North Dakota or Nebraska and buy up a town and turn it into a white homeland?
Merlin: That's going to get huger and huger, I think.
Merlin: I hear about that all the time.
Merlin: Once you get better ability to get good internet way far out in the middle of places, I think more towns are going to be taken over by nuts for sure.
Merlin: Yep.
John: Just like, hey, this is – this part of North Dakota now is for whites only.
John: Then come at us, feds.
John: And the feds will just be like, you know what?
John: That's good.
John: Actually, you know what?
Merlin: That's fine.
Merlin: The more angry, vindictive, probably insane whites you can get into this area, the better off we – our job will get easier if more of you can be attracted here.
Merlin: Yeah, that's actually a good idea.
John: It's like a nut magnet.
John: Somewhere in North Dakota, we draw a circle and we say, hey, guess what?
John: White homeland.
John: And then every person to whom the idea of a white homeland is appealing, they all go there.
John: And then that's great.
John: That's fucking fantastic.
John: Like it's self-select crazy town.
John: White homeland.
John: And then I don't know whether in the middle of the night we build like a giant Berlin wall.
John: We drop down like a bell jar.
John: Just like zoop.
John: Hey, guess what?
John: Prison camp.
John: Wow.
John: You didn't see that coming.
John: And they're all in there.
John: They got all their guns.
John: Just bouncing off the bell jar.
John: Yeah.
John: And then pretty soon, inevitably, they start getting in gunfights with each other over like minute...
John: problems in the doctrine.
John: Little by little, they just eliminate one another.
John: So white homelands up there, definitely.
Merlin: I love that.
Merlin: We should put that in front of Elon Musk.
Merlin: I think that's a good one.
Merlin: A proactive white homeland.
Merlin: Instead of saying, oh, tsk, tsk, tsk to all of you terrible people.
Merlin: No, we're encouraging this.
Merlin: We want to basically build a giant land for all those moths to fly to.
John: Well, exactly.
John: And then talk about building an old West town there.
John: I mean, just like give them exactly the like flag waving.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: We'll tell them we'll have brochures.
Merlin: You're going to be able to get souvenir spoons.
Merlin: You're going to have those big giant three wheeled motorcycles you can ride around on.
Merlin: There'll be Sam's.
Merlin: There'll be like Walmarts and Sam's there.
Merlin: It's everything you want.
Merlin: There'll be giant parking spaces.
John: Oh, fuck.
John: This is incredible.
John: You can put as big a tailpipe on your diesel, your Cummings diesel Dodge pickup as you want.
John: The tailpipe could be as big as a 50-gallon drum.
Merlin: There's literally no one to say anything.
Merlin: Nut trucks, truck nuts, not a problem.
Merlin: Just put them on anything.
Merlin: Put them on your wife.
Merlin: We don't care.
John: The biggest truck nuts.
John: We'll have truck nuts the size of soccer balls.
Merlin: What if we erect proactively, again, erect the largest truck nuts in the world?
Merlin: We make it one of our primary attractions.
John: Oh, fuck yes.
John: You can see it for a thousand miles in every direction.
John: You'd be nuts not to come.
John: Oh, come on.
John: White Homeland.
John: You'd be nuts not to come.
John: So White Homeland's up there.
John: But then somewhere a little bit further south where the air is clean, we build another.
John: We just draw a big circle.
John: And I'm talking about 500 square miles, right?
John: It's a big, big circle.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: It's a big circle.
John: And we just say Sin City.
John: Sin City and you go there and it's all it's just fucking any anything goes and you sign a disclaimer walking through the gates like you have no recourse to the law in here and
John: And heads up, there are definitely going to be people in here who have decided that they are the law.
John: And that's your problem.
John: Like, that's fine, too.
John: You walk in there and you are going to get immediately.
John: It's just like being in a fun prison.
John: Right.
John: There are going to be gangs in here.
John: They're going to be.
John: But it's a fun.
John: It's a fun prison.
John: It's a fun prison.
John: There are going to be bad, bad men, and a lot of you think that you can go in here and have fun and come out at the end of the weekend, and probably 89% of you will come out unscathed.
Merlin: Let's talk about just a couple things just to help you manage your expectations.
Merlin: One, we just need to get right out of the way.
Merlin: There's no Uber.
Merlin: You're not going to be able to call someone to pick you up and take you somewhere else.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's going to be a lot more like Escape from New York.
Merlin: Oh, 100%.
Merlin: But I mean, the thing is, people who think like, oh, this is great, me and my frat brothers are going to go here and it's going to be an awesome bro time.
Merlin: It's much more likely that one of you is going to get a broken nose and possibly sodomized.
Merlin: Sure, absolutely.
Merlin: Not in a mean way, but this is a serious Wild West environment in this big circle.
John: That's right.
John: Sin City, my friends.
John: And somebody, I guarantee you, after it's been there for a few years, somebody's going to appoint themselves mayor of Sin City.
Merlin: I think a lot of people will.
Merlin: I think probably by 8 o'clock on a Saturday night, there will be a lot of... Is it okay to have guns there?
Merlin: Can you have a pistol?
Merlin: Yes, you can.
Merlin: Sin City, man.
Merlin: Let it go.
Merlin: Let it ride.
Merlin: I think there'll be a lot of shooting up in the air.
Merlin: That just might be your way of letting people know you're ready for a refill.
John: Sure, it's shooting up in the air.
John: It's going to be like a Palestinian funeral, right?
John: It's just every day.
John: Um, so, and I really, and I feel like it would relieve a lot of pressure on the rest of the world.
John: Uh, and you know, some of those frat boys are going to be up there like, which one do we go to white homeland or sin city?
John: It's like, they're only, it's a six hour drive between one and the other.
John: There are a lot more churches in white homeland.
John: Uh, but you know,
Merlin: You know, I see maybe you might start with White Homeland.
Merlin: That becomes like a Hodge.
Merlin: You know, like, let's go to White Homeland.
Merlin: We're going to go hang out there for a while.
Merlin: We'll visit the Big Rock.
Merlin: We'll go to the Sam's Club, pick up some brews, and then we'll drive down to Sin City.
Merlin: Take the diesel truck.
John: There'll be a Hyperloop is what there'll be.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
John: I'm telling you, I feel like voluntary sequestering.
John: Of both cranks and – Hopeless substance abusers?
John: Well, you know, I don't – the thing about Sin City is it wouldn't –
John: Like the hopeless could go there for sure, but there would be a lot of people who want to go to Sin City.
John: I mean, people go to Vegas and they are, you know, the Disneyfication of Vegas notwithstanding, there are still people in Vegas and in Amsterdam and frankly in Hamburg and New York City who have the money to get what they want.
John: And what they want is available there.
John: And you just have to go through a lot.
John: You have to talk to a lot of bellhops.
John: Right, right, right.
John: And skeezy cab drivers to find the path.
John: I mean, probably if you have enough money, you know what the path is.
John: Right.
Merlin: But you need an entree into that community.
John: That's right.
John: And you need to be ready to drop serious coin.
Right.
John: Yeah.
John: Whereas in Sin City, it's there.
John: And the thing about, I think, Sin City is that there are gates.
John: So you can't just traffic a bunch of 14-year-old Thai girls in there.
John: Like you have to get through the gate.
John: There are people at the gate that's like, nope, sorry, no minors.
John: And everybody that comes in here, each person walks into a room, the door closes behind them, and then...
John: The person behind the desk says, are you under duress in any way?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But there's also the element of the prostitute saying to the undercover cop, you know, the supposed John saying, show me your dick.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Because I know I know if you're a cop, you won't show me your dick.
Merlin: If I ask you for a cop, you're not going to say you're a cop.
Merlin: But if you actually whip it out now before we talk about money, show me your dick.
Merlin: And then we'll talk about the money.
Merlin: There might be somebody that will vet you.
Merlin: Is Sin City the right place for you?
John: That's right.
John: If you are here and you are having some second thoughts or you're here with somebody who is holding your arm a little too tightly saying, let's go to Sin City.
John: And now you're in a room and here's what we'll do.
John: We have it in the budget to fly you anywhere in the United States.
John: And you never have to walk through that door that you just came through.
John: You can go out this special door.
John: They will never know what happened to you.
John: And we will fly you anywhere in the country.
Merlin: This is getting really elaborate, John.
John: Well, you know, you have to.
Merlin: Now you got an airstrip.
Merlin: Now you got an airstrip.
John: Of course there's an airstrip.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: It's going to be the biggest airport in the world.
John: The airport outside of Sin City.
John: And the letters on the luggage is S-I-N.
John: That's the airport code.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I want to run.
John: I want to have the Cinnabon concession at Sin City Airport.
John: Cinnabon.
Merlin: Show me your dick.
Merlin: I think we helped a lot of people with that one.