Ep. 186: "Electric Papers"
John: Oh, no.
John: Well, you know, I haven't been getting ill lately, and I'm going to stick with that.
John: You know, I have a good friend that claims that she never gets sick.
John: And when I have personally witnessed her being sick, she denies that she's sick.
John: And that's such a flip from most people, or I don't know, from a lot of people who are always getting sick when they're not.
John: She never gets sick when she is.
John: And I've started to kind of adopt that mentality.
John: I'm not sick.
John: I don't get sick.
Merlin: I'm actually pretty interested in that because I have met people like this.
Merlin: And it's hard to tell whether it works or not.
Merlin: It's one of those things like, you know, scaring the alligators away.
Merlin: But, like, I've met people who seem, they are so fixed in their insistence that they aren't sick and don't get sick.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That they sometimes seem to actually beat it back.
Merlin: And I wonder if that works.
Yeah.
Merlin: I wonder that too.
Merlin: What about the corollary?
Merlin: The corollary is we constantly think you're getting sick and then you do get sick.
Merlin: Now, I believe that can be a thing.
Merlin: Oh, that happened.
Merlin: That used to happen to me all the time.
John: You remember when I would come on this program, I'd be sick all the time.
John: You used to be sick all the time.
John: I was sick all the time and now I'm chasing the alligator away is what we're basically saying.
John: So that's happening.
John: I feel some sensations which are not sickness sensations but are just simply my body telling me that I'm alive.
John: And that foreign agents are lurking.
John: They're lurking around the dark corners of the city of my lungs and nose.
John: And I'm not going to allow them.
John: It's basically going to be a counter insurgency on the part of my white blood cells and other things that I don't understand.
Right.
John: So it's a counterinsurgency against... The attack on your dark city.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Okay, well, we haven't talked about this in a while, but there's always... I feel like we've left the door open to the idea that... First of all, let's take it as red.
Merlin: There's probably other stuff out there.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: There are some people who say, well, obviously there's nothing else out there in the universe or they already would be here.
Merlin: I don't have the logical skills to say whether that makes any sense.
Merlin: I think we can also probably agree that if there are people coming here, they're people.
Merlin: Listen to me.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: People.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: People.
John: Right.
John: This is the problem.
John: Stop being so sapien centric.
John: Normative.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like Star Trek.
Merlin: You know, you look like a regular person, but then they put some makeup on you.
Merlin: I mean, that's a very limited.
Merlin: Some green stuff and some weird ears.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Well, I think we can agree that you would probably be the emissary.
Merlin: That seems clear.
Merlin: So what if it's not somebody in a shiny LeMay cape and a green face?
Merlin: What if you are being reached?
Merlin: What if your dark city is being contacted by these very attackers that you now seek to repel?
Aha.
Merlin: So I'm saying, what if, I'm not saying you should do this, you'd probably be very busy right now, but what if you opened yourself to the idea there could be some kind of beatific experience happening here that's not about illness.
Merlin: It reads as illness because you've never been an emissary as far as we know before.
Merlin: What if they're out there, they're knocking on the door, they say, hey, John, can we come in?
John: Yeah, sure.
John: And they're saying, this is how we make contact.
John: This is how we want to commune with you.
John: And right now your body is having some kind of fairly profound reaction, but it's just that your body doesn't know how to interpret interstellar.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: I mean, what if it's a form of benign galactic toxoplasmosis where first they need to plant some ideas to let you sit around with those ideas for six weeks before they go to the next stage?
John: Sure, sure, sure.
John: Take a look at the star man playing with his ding dong.
Merlin: Wrong song.
Merlin: And yet these lyrics work.
Merlin: And then I go out and twerk.
Merlin: It's a funicular show.
Merlin: I feel like that is... That's maybe my favorite David Bowie song.
John: Yeah, and I feel like it may be a star man playing with his ding dong.
John: What I want...
Merlin: Just to get the actual lyric for later on.
Merlin: Take a look at the star man playing with his ding dong.
John: Oh, man.
John: Look at that ding dong go.
John: It's a funicular show.
John: Is there life in John's?
John: mind and in his nasal cavity uh what i want is a guarantee what i want no more taxes on my father's life have you been watching it no do you know about it i don't want to watch the weird one oh yeah i don't want to watch the weird one especially not the later weird one it's only seven hours long john it's seven hours long and it and it involves a conspiracy to kill the pope and i don't want to hear it no no no no no they don't include that one it's seven hours of just the first two movies yeah
John: But I take your point.
John: I don't want to see Robert De Niro appear halfway through a film.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Or at the beginning of a film.
John: What am I trying to say?
John: I don't even understand it.
Merlin: You know, that's the first one I saw.
Merlin: Your first concern?
Merlin: You don't want Mike coming out of that bathroom with his dick in his hand.
John: That's right.
John: The first one I saw in 1977 or whatever, they sat me down in front of the television.
John: The same way in fifth grade they handed me Tale of Two Cities and said, you're a smart kid.
John: Here, read Tale of Two Cities.
John: I was like, okay.
John: And it was like a dare, right?
John: It was like, oh, you're a smart kid.
John: Here, go for it.
John: Read Tale of Two Cities.
John: And I was like, sure, I've never heard of the French Revolution, but yes, all right, I can do this.
John: And I did it like you would say, here kid, climb this ladder.
John: You did it.
John: It was like eating your peas.
John: You did the whole thing?
John: I did the whole thing, but I had no actual comprehension of what I was doing.
John: But when they asked me about, I'm talking about the people in the schools now.
John: When they required that I write a book report about it because they didn't,
John: Because obviously I wasn't going to read Watership Down with the rest of the class, right?
John: I'd read it already.
John: It's too sad.
John: So they were like, oh, you know, this is the honors program.
John: Read Moby Dick.
John: And I did those things.
John: And then I was required to report to them, report to adults who, even at the time, I thought had not read those books.
John: uh and i didn't know what i had read but i gave a good you know i gave a good game but the problem was that that because it was a dare i couldn't say that i didn't get them because then the adults would be disappointed in me and then i wouldn't be a genius so it's the worst of times and the worst of times that's right you know so you can't win it's a can't win dickens who wrote that
John: Yeah, Dickens wrote Tale of Two Cities, and then he also wrote Moby Dick.
John: It all tells the same story.
John: Basically, a white whale fights a revolution against some kind of sun king.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that was later turned into the play Les Miserables.
John: That's right.
John: Exactly.
John: Les Miserables.
John: And then there are helicopters that come down and there's some kind of Vietnam allegory where he goes up a river.
John: So it's the Sun King goes up a river, finds a white whale.
John: Yep.
John: Battles with himself.
Merlin: Chases him for the rest of his life.
Merlin: Whales like you can never change.
John: In any case, the first time I saw The Godfather, I was satted down in front of a television, an enormous television that also had a record player in it.
John: And people said, this is an important film and you need to watch it.
John: And then they left, right?
John: They didn't want to watch it.
John: They went upstairs.
Merlin: Oh, that should tip you off.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And they're like, this is for you now.
John: We are punching your card.
John: We are giving you an adult ID.
John: And it involves watching The Godfather.
John: So I sat in front of it.
John: Again, uncomprehending.
John: wanting to watch Happy Days, wanting to be a normal kid, forced to watch this long, confusing, slow-moving film where they had edited out all the parts where people died, or all the blood and guts.
John: So it was just, what is this?
John: Montage with the baptism of the baby and then people walking in and out of barbershops.
Merlin: Yeah, what's that?
Merlin: Emergency haircuts.
Merlin: I don't get this at all.
Merlin: All I know is I'm not going to use revolving doors anymore.
John: So that's right.
John: I'm never going to come down the steps of a federal courthouse.
John: Every time, uh-oh, somebody's writing a ticket.
Merlin: I'm getting out of here.
John: Get out!
John: So, yeah, I was miserable, and then later on, I don't even remember how I reintroduced myself to it, but maybe it was that I got tired of middle-aged men making references that I didn't understand.
John: And now, of course, I've seen it 25 times.
Yeah.
Merlin: Also, you know, movies used to be shorter.
John: Interesting.
John: I think the deer hunter disproves that.
Merlin: Well, but before the 1970s, I mean.
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, you know, it's funny to think about.
Merlin: There's so much that comes washing over me now that I still love movies and I have a kid and I like watching movies.
Merlin: But like there's so much to think about where like and actually my kid was asking me about she was looking at one of my X-Men posters yesterday and saying, what is the comics code?
Merlin: How could she miss your X-Men posters?
Merlin: I have five of them here in the office.
Merlin: And she's saying, what is the comics code?
Merlin: She's seen this on old comics.
Merlin: And I did the best I could with my meager understanding of it to say, well, you know, there was this before I was born.
Merlin: There was a controversy kind of built up out of almost nothing about how basically comic books were damaging kids.
Merlin: I couldn't tell her all the things that, you know, they were worried about.
Merlin: You know, there's the sexy things.
Merlin: But I said, like, for example, you couldn't have zombies in comic books anymore was one of the things.
John: There's all kinds of things.
John: That's part of the comics code.
Merlin: Well, there's this book that came out.
Merlin: The name escapes me.
Merlin: But there's a book that came out in the mid-50s by this demagogue who basically was saying the comics are destroying our children.
Merlin: And mainly I think going after –
Merlin: sort of, you know, there was a time when war comics and especially crime comics were popular, but another huge genre was like the Tales of the Crypt, the EC comics, those wonderful comics about, you know, gory stuff.
Merlin: You know, I loved those.
Merlin: Those are, first of all, they're beautiful.
Merlin: They still stand the test of time.
Merlin: They look fantastic.
Merlin: But the Comics Code was a way of saying, it was kind of like the PMRC in the 80s, where they said, look, either you can let us do this and we'll just shut you down, or you can find some way to placate us by, you know,
Merlin: patrolling yourselves and so there was this i'll try and find it uh send it to you later but there was this you know crazy list of stuff you just couldn't do in comics anymore including things like i want to say like a challenging authority there were things were like you could well you couldn't do stuff like you couldn't i think you weren't allowed to insult heads of state and things like that there was all this crazy one of those like omnibus bills kind of things and it you know it's what made comics kind of lame for a while and it wasn't until the 70s that that really got kind of brushed away
John: Do you remember – now that I think about that, it seemed like whenever a president or, you know, exactly as you say, a head of state or even like a head of business showed up in a comic –
John: it was always like sort of a weird hero that didn't, that you wish would go away as fast as he could.
John: Like, hey, it's President Reagan.
John: Hello there, Superman.
Merlin: Usually pretty clunky.
Merlin: I think there's an Avengers with David Letterman in it that was pretty weird.
Merlin: I don't know if it was the Avengers, but there was definitely, well, of course, famously, you got Captain America who was always punching Hitler in the face.
Merlin: That was kind of cool.
Merlin: I guess that one you could get a pass on.
John: Punch Hitler in the face.
John: I mean, then Quentin Tarantino really, really took that all the way.
John: He reinterpreted it with Japanese girls with swords.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Cut off Hitler.
Merlin: But my favorite.
Merlin: Go ahead.
John: Go ahead.
Merlin: No, I was going to say was the bridge here is that there was a time where I guess it was believed that in certain kinds of media, you had to create media that would be utterly inoffensive to anyone, including like a toddler.
Merlin: This is before the idea of like the rating system came along in movies.
Merlin: And so, you know, there would be, you know, double entendres and stuff like that.
Merlin: But you could go to a movie theater with your kid and see pretty much any movie.
Merlin: It might not be interesting to that child, but there would be nothing in it that was, you know, horrific.
Merlin: That wasn't until whatever, was it Midnight Cowboy was the first X-rated, famous X-rated film?
Merlin: The rating system came along, I think, in the late 60s with similar concerns, you know?
John: Do you know that my mom...
John: Now that you're saying this, my mom sat me down, again, right about the time they were forcing me to read Moby Dick and watch The Godfather.
John: She was watching a film with me and she said, that right there is a code for them having sex.
John: Like leaned over and said that.
John: And I was like, what?
John: What?
John: Huh?
John: What?
John: Like shoes on the floor or something.
John: I had missed it.
John: And what it was was, you know, it was like some From Here to Eternity movie where they were kissing and then the camera turns away.
John: Camera panned away and there were waves washing on the beach, right?
John: Or it was or, you know, the camera panned away and it was a locomotive going into a tunnel or whatever it was.
Merlin: It was a man making a ring with his left hand and putting the forefinger from his right hand into it and out of it repeatedly.
John: And as an eight-year-old, I hadn't gotten it.
John: I thought that they liked each other very much and were kissing.
John: And then we were segwaying to another scene.
John: And my mom was like, that's a code for having sex.
John: And I was embarrassed, of course, because whenever anybody talked about sex, it was embarrassing.
John: Yes.
John: But I was curious about it, right?
John: Like, what is this code?
John: And so somehow we got into a conversation about it, and I think it was that she probably brought it up again and said, look, in movies, when people are having sex, they can't make an overt reference to it, so there are all these ways.
Merlin: You're 9, 10, 11 at this point?
John: How old?
John: I'd say eight.
John: Oh my.
John: And so then I was curious about every aspect of that.
John: People having sex, first of all.
John: And then, you know, she was like, they can't show tongue kissing.
John: Do you ever notice that?
John: They go in and they're very passionately kissing, but it's kind of like that scene.
John: It's kind of like some scene from Animal House where the guy puts his hand up over her mouth and then starts passionately kissing the back of his hand.
John: Yeah.
John: Passionate kisses are still very chaste.
John: And she was like, that's not how people actually kiss when they're about to make love.
John: That is fake.
Merlin: You're eight at this point.
John: Yeah, because that is in the movies.
John: And I'm like, how do people actually kiss?
John: And she's like, well, they slobber all over each other, their tongues, and snot is coming out of their nose.
John: It's really horrific.
John: And I was like, okay, all right, okay.
John: Because, you know, my mom,
John: A, my parents weren't married anymore.
John: And B, they both kept their affection for their friends, if you will, completely out of public eye, right?
John: If my mom was kissing someone and I walked in the room, the kissing stopped.
John: And everyone, you know, everyone clasped their hands in their laps and said, so anyway, what were we talking about?
John: Moby Dick.
Mm-hmm.
John: And so I didn't really see it.
John: You know, it was the 70s.
John: People were slobbering over each other big, big ways.
John: But I didn't have a lot of firsthand exposure to it.
John: So I was like, ugh, what are they?
John: People do what now?
John: A train goes into a tunnel?
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, I understood the mathematics of sex.
John: But I think those codes really did a job on us.
John: It's like we never see dead bodies.
John: I mean, in movies we do, but we never see them in person.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah, I've been, last few months, I guess, I've been really struggling with this, with my kid, because I wish she had a chance to be interviewed about her understanding of these things, because I think it'll be extremely interesting.
Merlin: Very, very different from the understanding of an eight-year-old in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.
Merlin: I bet it's different in every era, what you think.
John: I'm willing to conduct those interviews if you want to fund.
Merlin: Yeah, I would get a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help out.
Merlin: But, you know, but, you know, you think about again, think about in the 80s when or for that matter, think about the 70s.
Merlin: Think about how much.
Merlin: It's basically all I do.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: But think about how much like straight up murder was on TV.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, right.
Merlin: There was a lot of – yeah, Kojak, Chicago, Bang Bang.
Merlin: You start thinking a lot about like all – there was so much just people getting killed on TV.
Merlin: And so the conventional wisdom over the years became that Europeans think it's so weird that we have so much murder on TV and so little like genuine like affectionate sex and then kind of vice versa.
Merlin: So we get one of those British imports where there's no shooting but boobies and it's like, you know, hail Britannia.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Carry on, Benny Hill.
Merlin: But the reason I say that is that I don't say too much here.
Merlin: But, you know, my but for example, like there are times when you need a bridge to explain something about what's going on in the past.
Merlin: Like where the camera pans away and shows us a train tunnel and a man doing this with his finger.
John: No, it's a picture of a bridge.
John: Camera pans away and it's like, oh, this is this is a real segue.
Merlin: It's actually a bridge.
Merlin: The first time that's actually that's part of the movie, honey.
Merlin: The first time I ever said this, I already knew I was going down a path that I would have to walk back at some point.
Merlin: But the term became kissing.
Merlin: Like, OK, so that's, you know, and that could be a way of explaining that.
Merlin: Well, yeah, here's what it means to be gay.
Merlin: What it means to be gay is that you like kissing people that are the same gender as you.
Merlin: And like she's redonkulously open minded about that.
Merlin: Like it's really cool.
Merlin: Like she thinks it's really weird that you're not allowed to do what you want with who you want.
Merlin: But, you know, again, kissing.
Merlin: So but at some point at some point soon, that's going to start really happening.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So I'm not looking forward to the day where I I'm not worried so much about having to explain the actual real world mechanics, but like we're gonna have to go rewatch a lot of things and go, oh, that really wasn't about kissing.
John: Yeah, I'm going to start I'm going to start referring to sex as beyond kissing.
John: And I think that that's going to actually improve my life in a lot of ways.
John: Just be like, are you, are we ready?
Merlin: I feel like we're in a pretty terrible time for the ratings, the MPAA rating system at this point because.
John: See, I wasn't talking about movies anymore.
John: I was just talking about in my personal life.
Merlin: Oh, no, I think it's a terrific idea.
Merlin: Would you like to go beyond kissing with me?
Merlin: Or just yes.
Merlin: And you start just kissing the back of your hand and they're like, I should go.
John: What I'm doing is going back throughout my entire life and inserting beyond kissing into every instance where I've used the word sex.
John: And I like my life better now, retroactively.
John: I would love to have some beyond kissing with you.
John: That is how I'm going to remember my life.
John: I would like to go back for a second into this podcast and comment that earlier, just a few moments ago, you and I both said, you go ahead simultaneously.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I don't think that's ever happened before.
John: I think that was the first time.
Merlin: It's happened probably three times.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: You go ahead?
Merlin: I try not to interrupt you.
Merlin: I'm an interrupter by nature, and I try not to do that on this show.
John: But I feel like...
John: I feel like it's the first time we both ever said it.
John: At the same time, you go ahead.
John: No, you go ahead.
John: But it was simultaneous.
John: You go ahead.
John: We both wanted the other to go ahead.
John: And then we got jammed up in a revolving door.
Merlin: And then somebody shot us both.
Merlin: I still think about that every time I go through.
Merlin: My daughter, of course, she's a child.
Merlin: She loves a revolving door.
Merlin: I don't like going through a revolving door.
Merlin: I'm waiting for somebody to lock it up, and then Willie Chi Chi gives it to me.
John: But you're screwing up the climate control in all these hotels and office buildings.
John: You open that side door and the whole climate of the building goes racing out like a like Ghostbusters.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, it's just 70 different climates all running out with hot dogs in their mouths.
John: And then you are you fucked it all up.
John: Whereas if you go through the revolving door, it's just one little climate.
Merlin: One little climate.
Merlin: Do you use a revolving door?
Merlin: That seems antithetical to a lot of your training.
John: The only time I actually use a revolving door is if somebody's going through ahead of me that I know.
John: And then as the revolving door is halfway through, I stick my foot in it.
John: And then it stops and the person slams into the glass.
John: And it's one of my favorite gags.
John: And I do it all the time.
John: And a lot of my friends know I'm going to do it.
John: But then they forget because they get excited about going through a revolving door.
John: And everybody does.
John: They see it coming and they're like, here we go.
John: And then I jam my foot in it and they slam into the glass and it's just like, I love it.
John: Over and over and over, that gag works.
John: Do you renounce Satan?
John: I renounce Satan.
John: Pow!
John: And a lot of the times I'll slam the revolving door into them and then I'll go around and go into the...
John: going through the it's fun to have you as a friend there's always a little surprise around every corner that's right that is the kind see that's the kind of thing that's why people call me an asshole yeah but it doesn't really it nothing about that is bad you know they'll survive that they didn't do anything wrong it's you know it's me it's on it's on me but it's also it's small and it's just putting a little bit of joy into everybody's life i think
Merlin: Yeah, that's so nice of you to do that.
John: Yeah, even the guy that's dressed like a beef eater who's standing outside hailing cabs for you, he laughs too.
John: We all laugh.
John: Yeah, he's seen it all.
John: That guy's seen it all.
John: Anyway, sorry I interrupted you.
Merlin: He's working right next to a giant poster of himself.
Merlin: Can you imagine that?
Merlin: His idea of getting dressed for work is so different than my idea of getting dressed for work.
Merlin: Can you imagine if we had to dress as beef eaters every day?
John: He's dressed like a Revolutionary War minute man, and he's helping Kevin Costner into a little bed and breakfast, but he's going to remember.
John: He's going to remember his face, and he's going to walk around the Pentagon trying to see him, and Kevin Costner's going to be hiding in bathrooms.
John: This is part of the job.
John: Huh, huh.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, ratings are complicated.
Merlin: It's complicated stuff.
John: You know what's complicated?
John: What's that?
John: I hate to segue.
Merlin: No, segue.
Merlin: I want to come back to a movie dick at some point, but go ahead.
John: Okay, I hate to pan across a bridge, but I have two dongles now.
John: Oh, no.
John: Two dongles?
John: I have two dongles.
John: I used to have one key, if you recall.
John: Once upon a time, I had one key.
John: My life was simple.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And then I had more keys and then more and then more.
John: And then I got a dongle.
John: I didn't want a dongle.
John: Screwed up my whole key ring.
John: Now I've got two dongles.
John: This is the direction we're going.
John: One day I have a ring of dongles, no keys.
Merlin: A dongle, is it one of those it gives you a passcode to get into something kind of thing?
Merlin: Or is it like a giant car key?
John: No, no, no.
John: Well, so there are some car keys, like if you drive a Nissan Leaf or something, you have a dongle in your pocket.
John: You have a small generator on it.
John: Is that what it is?
John: I think so.
John: There's no need for the keys to be that big, really.
John: You never have to put it in the car, though.
John: You just sit in the car.
John: It knows you're there.
John: It knows your key is in the car.
John: And it starts the car.
John: Right.
John: That's the this is the future.
John: Yes.
John: Because the thing is, even though after 40 years of computers, 40 years of personal computers, we act.
John: My mom said this to me the other day.
John: I know that she's becoming more and more a character on this podcast.
John: Finally.
John: And she objects to it because she feels like I am misrepresenting her.
John: If I am misrepresenting her, it is only that I'm not describing how actually tough she is.
John: But I was sitting on the couch.
John: Your mom is impossibly tough.
John: I was reading some Scientific American or something and she walks in and she says, did you know that computers have not increased productivity one iota?
John: And I looked up and I was like, huh?
John: And she said, it's true.
John: Did you know that?
John: No.
John: And she said, it takes just as long to do everything now as it did in 1965.
John: The only thing that computers have done is increase productivity in things that are not important that only exist to be computer things.
John: And so we can't compare it to how long it took in 1965 because we didn't have Photoshop then.
John: But in terms of like paying your checkbook or some business practice, she was like, I was doing computers in business for 30 years and at no point along the way did it ever increase productivity one iota.
John: And it still hasn't.
John: And I was like, uh, uh, and I was thinking and thinking about, about, uh, processes and realizing that I could not refute what she said with anything.
John: And I was like, Oh dear.
John: And she was like, she, she wasn't referring directly to my dongle, which performs exactly what, you know, the function of a key.
John: Except it's awkward.
John: It's more awkward than a key.
John: I'm so lost right now.
John: What does the dongle do?
John: It's a key.
John: Except instead of putting it in a lock, you touch it to a pad.
John: You get a fob.
John: It's a fob.
John: That's right.
John: I'm sorry.
John: A dongle and a fob are the same.
John: Yeah, one of them wears fancier hats.
John: If somebody can tell me the difference between a dongle and a fob, first of all, it will be someone who listens to this.
Merlin: I think a fob.
Merlin: I want to think of a fob.
Merlin: I think of like a near field communication kind of thing where it's like, you know what it is.
Merlin: It's like, what's his name?
Merlin: Detective Yakamoto?
Merlin: What was his name?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Well, let's just call him Detective Yakamoto.
John: Detective Yakamoto doing his little disco dance to make the door open, right?
John: That's right.
John: He reaches up, touches it with his butt and some card in his wallet.
John: But instead of maintaining his police-like dignity and sticking a key into a keyhole.
John: He takes a three-pointer with his ass.
John: That's right.
John: Wow!
John: Instead of a locomotive going into a train tunnel, now we have some sort of all that jazz moment.
John: And then we're walking past a recumbent bicycle.
John: A recumbent bicycle is a classic example.
John: I think he's a map right now.
John: So what she was trying to tell me is that throughout her entire career in computers, they would publish computer talk in magazines, probably called computer talk.
John: where they would editorialize and say, still, this is 1979 or something, still after all this investment in computers, we have not improved productivity one bit, or rather one iota.
John: And that was true all the way through 1996.
John: How many iotas are a bit?
John: How many iotas can dance on the head of a pin?
John: How many iotas can dance inside of a police evidence?
John: I think you got six iotas in a moment.
Merlin: There's 12 moments in a bit.
Merlin: And then you got like 75 bits in a megabyte.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's like base 1024.
John: Basically that.
John: And then Robert's Rules of Order comes into effect.
John: A point of personal privilege.
John: But I said to her, if these magazines were reporting this stuff, why didn't the general population rebel or say, what's going on with these things?
John: And she said at that time, unlike now, nobody read computer magazines except computer people.
John: And computer people at the time were unwilling to look critically at computers because it was their happy place.
John: But we would read these things and go, wow, it hasn't improved productivity one bit.
John: Well, it certainly will begin to do so right now, soon.
John: And then it never did.
John: what I like to talk about all the time, which is that we built the Saturn V rocket using pipe vendors and slide rules.
John: And we have yet to best it.
John: You know, we keep building rockets and they keep exploding on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: This is the slide rule argument.
John: Or, no, not even, well, I don't know.
John: I wouldn't call it the slide rule argument.
John: I would call it the balance your checkbook argument.
John: which is that at the end of the month, you sit down with your check register and you balance it with a pen as opposed to booting up your check balancing software and looking at all the pie charts that it generates.
John: But it takes the same amount of time and it has the same effect.
Merlin: Can I counter?
John: Yes, okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I'll just offer this quote from Upton Sinclair that I'm always misquoting and I want to get it right.
Merlin: It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Merlin: That's kind of what you're describing, right?
Merlin: In some ways, if you're a computer jockey, you're not going to look for instances where the computer stuff is not the best way.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But would you describe that as a counter or as a – Oh, no.
Merlin: I'm just doing that to kind of calm you down a little.
Merlin: Here's my counter.
Merlin: My counter is that it depends on what you're talking about being productive about because the massive change – we see little changes in how our life works as people who are on desktop and laptop and –
Merlin: mobile computers, the thing that's not in our face every day in that same way is that we're allowed to be productive or not productive about very different kinds of work, because in a way I will very loosely describe as behind the scenes, there's a lot of stuff being done by machines and computers that are actually making things much more efficient.
Merlin: I mean, think about something like that.
John: like agriculture agriculture like what you're able to do with agriculture is it you know at scale is so huge now that that infrastructure has developed beyond like you know being able to just get things locally or whatever but but i feel like i mean certainly at the level of crunching uh numbers like crunching prime numbers um computers are doing them allowing us to do that in a much larger scale um
John: And that is producing something that a lot of people are going to describe the tangible effect of that in terms of, for instance, like cryptology.
John: But that encryption is all now newly necessary because computers...
Merlin: Oh, it's creating new needs for new technology.
John: That's right.
John: The technology is fulfilling the need, which is... It's like my dad, when I took his car away, and he was like, I need my car.
John: And I said, why?
John: And he said, to go to the mechanic.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: So a lot of that stuff is just like...
John: I think that most of the agriculture productivity is a result of Monsanto gene manipulation, and it's produced a monoculture.
John: So it isn't actually an improvement.
John: It is a streamlining of a thing that we didn't want.
Merlin: Well, I think it's different, if I could say.
Merlin: I think it's different to argue whether it's an improvement rather than – in the aggregate, does all of that make the world better?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: All I'm trying to say is that it seems like in the inexorable march of technology, the thing that is fairly consistent is that as soon as it's –
Merlin: Less expensive and more reliable to have a machine do something.
Merlin: A machine will do that, which then necessarily changes the nature of what an actual person does.
Merlin: And so you can even look at the last 30, 40 years and how there was a time when you needed people who did things called word processing or data entry.
Merlin: That was a kind of job.
Merlin: And now there are machines that do that kind of stuff differently.
Merlin: better, faster, more efficiently, and less costly.
Merlin: So even though that was considered a technology job 30 years ago, it's not anymore because now that job is being done by the technology itself.
Merlin: So that necessarily changes what it is that we're doing on our computers.
John: Yes, it does.
John: But what I'm saying is that behind word processing, behind the machine taking over word processing, those are just...
John: Those are just ways of processing what we formerly did with typewriters on, you know, on what is that stuff called?
John: Where you type into a piece of black paper and it makes three copies.
John: Oh, carbon copies.
John: Carbon copies.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: But ultimately, all that technology, including the typewriters and the carbon copies, is meant to process your insurance claim.
John: All of that is ways of doing things which have more or less remained constant.
John: Process your insurance claim, fill out your mortgage documents, and that ultimately the end result, the processing of the insurance, the filling out the mortgage documents, still takes as much time
John: as it once did when it was done in longhand.
John: It just now involves a lot more people and a lot more process and a lot more layers of technology.
John: But the actual stuff that's getting done hasn't changed really and takes just as long.
John: And I know that right now the real question is how many John Syracuse's are dancing on the head of a pin trying to refute this argument yelling at his TV screen.
John: But I believe, and the ultimate proof of it is the fact that we have not only have we not reduced the 40-hour work week to 20 hours, but we have increased the 40-hour work week to 60 hours, and we have a lot more people working longer, and we have not accomplished a world in which machines are doing our work.
John: We've just added multiple, multiple layers of, you know, of, of action.
John: And it still takes, I mean, I don't know what the last time you filled out mortgage papers were.
John: Oh God, why haven't I?
John: But it's, it's like, I feel like, I feel like when you, when you got a mortgage in 1920, it took less time.
John: So anyway, that's... I'm going to get so many angry letters.
Merlin: Well, yeah, you probably should.
Merlin: But I don't... So you're really kind of talking about quality of life in some ways.
John: Well, I'm talking about why do we have computers and machines and what is their actual purpose?
John: And what we keep doing is applying them to things, applying them with the idea that we are streamlining our processes so that we can have all this extra free time to make art and sit on the beach.
John: And the computers have yet to prove that they can do those things actually better.
John: I mean, you can buy a home tax filling out computer program and you can input all your data into it and you can learn how to use it and
John: herpaderpaderp, but at the end of the day, it takes just as long to do your taxes as it did in 1950.
John: And so why have you put in, why have you bothered?
John: Yeah, okay.
John: All right.
John: And at the other end, yes, computers are processing prime numbers and sequencing genomes.
John: And those do have an effect on science and they are pushing the envelope forward.
John: But we don't reserve computers just to do that work.
John: We spend most of our energy and most of our time trying to apply computers to newspaper layouts.
John: And doing it on the computer, you're bamboozled into thinking that it's easier and better and faster and so forth.
John: But it actually...
John: It just takes as much time as when we used to put stickum glue down on a piece of graph paper.
John: And the end result is questionably better.
John: You know, all the time we talk about kerning, kerning, kerning.
John: And we used to do that by hand, but it was better.
John: It was prettier and it was closer to the truth of it, really.
Merlin: It's never been easier to email you about this.
Merlin: Technology has made it so easy for people to email you about this.
John: Oh, they're going to.
John: I'm going to get so many angry emails from people who are barely on the spectrum.
Merlin: Oh, dear.
Merlin: Okay, so let me ask you this.
Merlin: Is there a time, an era, where you feel like it was in the sweet spot?
Merlin: For, like, on the one hand, it's nice that food doesn't make us sick anymore.
Merlin: On the other hand, we don't want devices in our house listening to us to create ads that are appropriate.
Merlin: Somewhere in between, where do you think the sweet spot was for where you think technology was put to good use but not too much good news?
John: Well, I want to go back to your claim that food formerly made us sick and now computers have made it so that food doesn't make us sick.
Merlin: It's not computers.
Merlin: It's technology.
Merlin: This is the problem.
Merlin: In a world where we think all technology is about new apps, the problem is that so much of the reporting about what we now call technology is really about consumer-facing devices.
Merlin: So it's easy to make a straw man about technology when you talk about Samsung having a refrigerator with a large screen on it.
Merlin: Like, yeah, OK, yeah, I get that silly.
Merlin: But a couple of things is the first of all, there's all kinds of technology happening behind the scenes to make life easier and safe and reliable and less costly.
Merlin: But then on the other hand, I also I've learned to become reluctant about drawing too many conclusions about a future that I can't understand, where something that right now seems like an inconvenience or a silly thing to me within five years might be something that's that's a pretty big deal that I'm really glad is there.
John: Yeah, but I'm not talking about the future.
John: I'm talking about the now.
John: But the future, now is the beginning of the future.
John: That's how it works.
John: Well, I know.
John: And my mom is saying that that has been the conversation since 1965, that in five years, we're going to have a paperless office.
John: In five years, you're not going to have to do your taxes.
John: In five years, we're going to be able to, you know, she said the amazing thing was in 1965, they said in five years, there won't be computer programmers because all that will be automated.
John: Right.
John: And then in 1970, they said in five years, there won't be computer programmers.
John: And they've been saying that every five years for the last 40 years.
John: And now we have more computer programmers than ever.
John: And there's more things to program about.
John: Right.
John: Which is a lot of how to do your tax software.
John: But I want to know.
John: That's not accurate.
John: I want to know exactly how computers have made food safer.
John: Or how technology?
Merlin: See, I am not prepared to debate this because I haven't had time to prepare for this.
Merlin: But I'm trying to think of – I'm thinking of things like along the lines of maybe having to do with things like being able to do quality control on various kinds of foods.
Merlin: Or I'm thinking about things like being able to track epidemiology, being able to track things like diseases that go around –
Merlin: You know, all the way down to like people in Africa being able to have the beginnings of trade based on SMS and things like that.
Merlin: There's all kinds of ways in which technology gets used in a novel way in a small way or in a scalable way in a big way that end up improving our life.
Merlin: And the thing is, I think the fallacy is to think that any given new technology is going to fix the world.
Merlin: It's not.
Merlin: It's just going to be the next technology that we then make a decision what to do with.
John: Which I guess I'm saying for the last 40 years, we have been tracking that.
John: And in any kind of, like, I think the food safety stuff that you're saying, the computers have made it much easier to import strawberries from New Zealand.
John: which is a thing that computers made it necessary to do in a way, you know, like w or, or like computers invented in importing strawberries from New Zealand in a way, let's just say technology did.
John: Yeah.
John: We now have the technology to have strawberries all year round.
John: And that's the, that's kind of the amazing thing.
John: We didn't use to have strawberries all year round.
John: Now we do.
John: And yeah,
John: And that is, I guess, the thing that I notice that actually is an improvement, right?
John: There was a time when you'd go to the grocery store in the winter and all you had was root vegetables and chocolate-covered grasshoppers.
John: Except the grasshoppers weren't chocolate-covered.
John: but now we have them and those things have created a whole new host of problems and you know and so now we have to use technology to to facilitate these processes processes that you know it's like we created problems and now are and now are solving my guess that is the march of technology
Merlin: Well, especially if you take technology to mean – again, that word technology can be kind of thorny.
John: You introduced technology into this conversation.
John: I was saying computers.
John: Computers, computers, computers.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Fair enough.
Merlin: Yeah, because I mean like is a better plow – because I'm trying to understand what you're saying to not just sound like an old man thing, but it sounds like you're saying that –
Merlin: Well, you tell me, but it sounds like you're saying that what widespread availability of computing means is just the need for more computing.
John: Well, no, I'm saying show me where quality of life has improved in the last 50 years that where you can directly tie it to improvements in technology.
Merlin: Well, it seems like every time I do that, though, you then turn that into a thing where you're just going to show how that's really about computers.
Merlin: But there are – I mean that's what it seems like.
Merlin: I mean I don't know.
Merlin: I don't – I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out is like when was there a time when this was ever any different?
Merlin: I mean, because I'm not sure I fully understand what your point is.
Merlin: And if I do, though, it's it's that there's something has changed in the last 40, 50 years.
John: I guess I would say at the turn of the at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, we had an explosion of technology that where we had the electric light bulb.
John: We had the, you know, certainly we would already have the locomotive, but we had the motor car.
John: We had the airplane.
John: And so throughout the 18th century, we developed the steam engine.
John: Ships no longer had sails.
John: And that was a fantastic march of progress.
John: You know, my mom remembers the first time she saw a tractor.
John: Because before that, they were plowing with horses.
John: Really?
John: That was like in her lifetime?
John: Well, I mean... Given where she lived.
John: There were already lots of tractors, but...
John: But they were expensive.
John: And so they were plowing her 40 acres with horses.
John: And then they got a tractor and a combine or a combine attachment to a tractor.
John: But still the cart where the grain was going was pulled by horses.
John: And that was pulled by horses into the late 40s.
John: So those are real technologies that changed everybody's life.
John: But we are looking at the last 40 years and I think the actual way we're living in 2015 or 2016 compared to how we were living in 1966 hasn't really changed.
John: We're basically flying the same airplanes.
John: We are driving the same cars for all intents and purposes and filling out our taxes and voting.
John: And we like to think that this has been a comparable revolution.
John: But a lot more of it is just spinning our wheels.
John: Because in 1966, the perception of where we would be in 2016 was just as you're saying, like, wow, five years from now, it's the future.
John: And...
John: a lot of the things that HG Wells talked about actually came true.
John: The, the, the physical, uh, like new technology actually was, became real and was astonishing.
John: And from 1966 to the present,
John: We haven't – things are very different.
John: We're doing very different things.
John: People aren't sitting and typing on carbon copy.
John: They are moving stuff around with a mouse.
John: But the output is still – the newspaper on the TV –
John: isn't actually much of a, it's, it's not a major change relative to a, to a newspaper.
John: We still read newspapers, not all of us.
John: Right.
John: But, uh, but you know, the information contained in it is more or less identical.
Right.
Merlin: I think of that as consumer facing stuff, though.
Merlin: I guess I'm thinking more about things that I don't understand in infrastructure, where I guess my gut would be that there are things in the infrastructure where that technology is making things better and safer.
John: Poop moves down tubes.
John: And before, poop was moving down tubes and guys in overalls were like, well, I think probably we got a clog up there at the headwaters.
John: And then they'd go up with shovels and a steam engine and dig it up.
John: And now we've got somebody sitting in a dark room looking at a thousand different poop lines and saying like, yep, the poop is clogged up at the headwaters.
John: And it is now computerized and it is better, right?
John: But not as dramatically as we think.
John: The poop still goes down tubes.
Merlin: Yeah, but part of that is also that's just the nature, I feel like part of that is just the nature of how changing technology works.
John: Well, except in the early 1900s, poop went from being buried in pits to going down tubes.
John: Or being thrown out a window.
John: Or being thrown out of a window, which is why the man walked on the edge of the sidewalk and threw his coat down into the puddle.
John: Yes.
John: So that was the major advance.
John: Now we have a sewer.
John: But computerizing the process of poop going down tubes hasn't really changed it.
John: It's still a 19th century technology.
John: It just has sensors in it now.
John: So I don't want to go down a list of 1,000 examples and you have 1,000 examples.
Merlin: My challenge with this is that I don't know enough about actual technology to be able to describe these things except by analogy, whereas I could join you –
Merlin: pretty easily in finding things that are exceptions or problems from these technologies that don't require a technical background.
Merlin: I'm a bad person to argue about this with because I just don't know enough about how it actually works.
Merlin: But again, I bet there's enough anecdotes about saying, well, now trains are going too fast.
Merlin: and pregnant women shouldn't ride on them, which was not true.
Merlin: But that's the kind of thing that they would say.
Merlin: You could say, yeah, we made these planes, but hey, those first planes that they sent into war were not that reliable, and they were used to kill people, so should we stop making planes?
Merlin: It's just that for every example, there's something that we learned, and maybe at this point, maybe I'm just being a little bit, what's that, English guy?
John: Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that we should stop, because I feel like we've talked about this quite a bit.
John: We are on the cusp
John: of a big revolution.
John: Like when self-driving cars, and I hate to keep bringing them up, but when self... Not really.
Merlin: When self-driving cars... I think they're fascinating, personally.
Merlin: I could have cared less a year ago, and now I'm really interested.
John: Yeah, when those are happening...
John: That will be the thing that I go, there it is.
John: That is an absolutely new thing that could not be accomplished without computers.
John: It is a major advance, and it changes everyone's life dramatically.
John: That will be the first sign that I have seen that the computer revolution of the late 20th century, the last 50 years of gearing up,
John: And getting everybody so that they understand this and increasing processing power to be able to revolutionize transportation in that way.
John: I'll go, yes, absolutely.
John: But the jet airplane was invented in the 40s.
John: And by the 50s, we had a 707 that was...
John: And what we've done in making the 787 is make that much incrementally more efficient, but still it's essentially the same thing.
John: And everyone, like in the 1950s office, we were accomplishing a tremendous amount of paper pushing, and we are still pushing those papers now.
John: They're just electric papers.
John: We're pushing electric papers.
John: But now with these systems coming online, that's going to be tremendous.
John: And I feel like Twitter is kind of a glimpse of the future.
John: But it is something new, right?
John: Something that didn't exist before that gives a glimpse of what society, how society is going to be different.
John: But I'm just saying that I feel like the last 40 years has just been changing the tools and maybe it's equivalent to the years between 1830 and 1880.
John: where we were building these creaky, weird little railroads and steam engines were increasing productivity and creating cities, but it wasn't clear what that was going to be like.
John: And then all of a sudden in 1880, there was an explosion of that technology.
John: And we also had cities now.
John: that were like a long-term product of the steam engine.
John: But it wasn't clear what those were going to be.
John: So now we had cities.
John: We had to solve city problems.
John: The steam engine was great for that.
John: But then it did change our lives, or the internal combustion engine changed our lives.
John: And that's about to happen.
John: And I'm excited about it.
John: And it is what technology is enabling us to do.
John: And now we're going to see what it is.
John: But we've been in our whole lives, we've been in this kind of interregulum where we've kind of just been
John: We've been taking all those boxes of legal papers up in the attic and we've been inputting them into the machines.
John: And we're on the cusp, I guess.
John: But what my mom was saying was, it was kind of proof of that, which is that we've been putting everything into computers all this time and it really hasn't increased productivity one, say it with me, iota.
John: not even a partial bit not even an iota which is a very small amount of iota right because it's iotas all the way down anyway write to me at john.roderick at fuckyou.com oh dear and send me all of the ways in which what I've just said is not true hmm hmm
John: Want to talk about billionaires?
John: No!
John: I wanted to like Moby Dick.
John: I found Moby Dick impenetrable as an eight-year-old, and so I thought when I was a 20-year-old that I would read it again and understand it.
John: And, you know, I'm an enormous Melville fan of other of his works.
Merlin: Well, I had to read it in college and I had a class called American Masterworks one semester and we read Absalom, Absalom, Moby Dick and The Ambassadors.
Merlin: And I liked Absalom, Absalom a lot.
Merlin: But maybe not so much the others.
Merlin: But I got through Moby Dick because I kept telling myself it was postmodern.
Merlin: Like it's up there with Tristram Shandy.
Merlin: It's like one of the original postmodern books is what I kept telling myself.
Merlin: Even though I never completely understood what that phrase meant and it didn't actually help make the book that much more interesting.
John: I preferred Joseph Conrad in every respect.
Yeah.
Merlin: um but yeah i didn't and you know i read tale of two cities again and i didn't like it either um but obviously the worst of all those books is billy bud billy bud that's herman melville too right billy bud billy bud that's uh that's another one that's on a ship right yeah unreadable unreadable you know here's the thing is that uh i was i was a good reader i was a big reader i read a lot but um
Merlin: But there was a thing that happened.
Merlin: And you can think about stuff like Classics Illustrated.
Merlin: There was definitely like a push in the 60s and 70s to get kids to want to read real books.
Merlin: Because it wasn't enough.
Merlin: Obviously, you should never read a comic book.
Merlin: That's going to rot your mind.
Merlin: You know, you can only read so much Henry Huggins before you become a dullard.
Merlin: Encyclopedia Brown, sure.
Merlin: You know, how are you going to get really smart unless you read these big, thick European books?
Merlin: What's Henry Huggins?
Merlin: Oh, Henry Huggins is that boy, you know, with Ramona Quimby and his dog Ribsy.
Merlin: They're very readable.
John: Does he solve crimes?
Merlin: Not per se.
Merlin: Not per se.
Merlin: It's just a pretty much straightforward kind of kid's book for a third, fourth, fifth grader.
John: Like Encyclopedia Brown?
Merlin: I love Encyclopedia.
Merlin: My daughter and I had an Encyclopedia Brown phase.
Merlin: Now, the problem with Encyclopedia Brown, you get any collection of Encyclopedia Brown stories, and a couple of them are really, really good stories.
Merlin: Where like I didn't see that coming or that was really smart.
Merlin: I've read this with my daughter a couple times.
Merlin: We read it through.
Merlin: We tried to look for the clue.
Merlin: There's usually a couple of those in every collection that are actually really good detective stories.
Merlin: And the rest are terrible.
Merlin: And they're not terrible.
Merlin: Some of them are terrible because they're obvious.
Merlin: The ones that are really terrible are where the trick just doesn't make any sense.
Merlin: There was one that was about how could you tell that he didn't actually lose this karate fight and it's because he fell backwards instead of forwards and stuff like that.
Merlin: You're like, come on.
Merlin: That is a good trick.
Merlin: Now, the guy who put his kid on the hood of the car where the hood should have still been hot because they'd supposedly been driving all day, that's right in the pocket for encyclopedia.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Well, and that's some Sherlock Holmes stuff.
John: Except there weren't cars.
Absolutely.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: But, you know, so part of it was, though, that – and I was a – not a victim of this, but I was subject to this – was, hey, let's make these – you know, it's so great whenever the grown-ups want to make stuff palatable to kids, which they really mean – it's like tricking your dog into eating a pill by putting it in peanut butter.
Merlin: Like, you know, after the dog has eaten the pill, it's going to go, oh, you just totally fucking tricked me.
Merlin: So, like, I remember I had a small collection of, like, inexpensive hardback books of the classics.
Merlin: But they had, like, fun covers.
Merlin: But it was still A Tale of Two Cities inside.
John: Yeah, yeah, I remember those.
Merlin: Like, where you try and make it more, like, fun.
Merlin: You'd update the covers and make it a little hip.
Merlin: And, like, it's still, like, ugh.
Merlin: I never got past the first couple pages of A Tale of Two Cities.
John: Did you ever see the Extreme Teen Bible?
Yeah.
Merlin: No, I don't think I know about this.
John: Yeah, Sean Nelson found one of these one time, the Extreme Teen Bible, and it was the Bible updated for teens, but not just teens.
John: Oh, come on.
John: Extreme teens.
John: No fears, no regrets.
John: That's right.
John: And so it had like...
John: I mean, it had been streamlined so that all the King James talk was taken out of it.
John: And it was just like, Jesus was a righteous dude, and he made the old shoe leather turn into fishes or whatever he did.
Merlin: Yeah, sure, sure, whatever he did.
Merlin: Something Matthew.
John: Yeah, like jumping up and down and he said this and then everybody was like, no.
John: And then he was like, yeah.
Merlin: And then he ripped off an extreme ollie.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: He carved a major fucking boner word.
John: And then, you know, certain passages were in red and then on the side there were sidebars where it was like, did you know?
John: that Jesus never took any shit off of nobody.
John: Ooh, yeah.
John: Ooh.
John: And it was fantastic.
John: We had lots of fun with the Extreme Teen Bible, and I think we may have read it aloud from stage on a particular tour.
Merlin: Let me ask you the obvious question here.
Merlin: So this was not just a different cover on, like, a New Standard translation.
Merlin: It was rewritten in Extreme Teen Ease.
John: Pretty sure.
Merlin: But did it still have chapters and verses?
Merlin: Or was it written more like stories?
John: More like, well, you know, they had chapters and verses in that they pulled out chapters and verses so that you can memorize the numbers so that you could use those to defeat other people in arguments.
John: Yeah, that's key.
John: So you could just be like, John 316, what do you say to that, brah?
John: And so they absolutely did that.
John: You know, there are a lot of those sort of quotes that are just like,
John: If you're in an argument with somebody, you just drop John 316 on them, and then they just better shut up.
Merlin: That means Stone Cold Steve Austin is going to kick your ass.
John: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Nelson's Extreme Teen Bible delivers just what teens are looking for, real answers to life's tough questions.
Merlin: All the innovative study helps are geared to the teen culture.
Merlin: I'll bet they are.
John: The teen culture.
Merlin: All the innovative study helps.
Merlin: Are you calling it Nelson's Extreme Teen Bible?
Merlin: It's written by Thomas Nelson.
John: Probably no relation.
John: That may be why Sean Nelson was first turned on to the Extreme Teen Bible.
John: This was before Search Engine.
John: Sure.
John: So he would have been in the bookstore looking at all the books that had been written by people named Nelson and discovered it.
John: I mean, it's just a guess.
John: Seems like a weird coincidence.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: So here's the official Amazon.com review.
Merlin: Extreme Teen Bible dares teens to crack open its pages and live up to the cutting edge standard found inside.
Merlin: Can you fucking do it?
Merlin: Can you do it?
Merlin: Can you crack it open?
Merlin: Are you going to be a chicken?
Merlin: Bawk, bawk, bawk.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Do you dare crack this open?
Merlin: This new King James translation, oh, bad idea, thoroughly explained in teen-friendly language.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: It's going to be totally grungified.
John: I feel like this is how Mark Driscoll got his start, right?
John: The famous Seattle minister with tattoos who's like, dude, brah, my wife is smoking hot.
John: To the max.
John: And I like to fucking do it with her over and over because that's the Christian way.
John: And your wife needs to submit to you.
John: It's like an S&M ministry with a lot of rock and roll that's founded in the concept of like your wife serves you.
John: That's what the Extreme Teen Bible told me.
Merlin: I love that idea.
John: Seriously, his congregation had like 10,000 members and they all were like, what's up, brah?
John: They all had nipple piercings or whatever.
John: And then it turned out that he was just...
John: Can you believe it?
John: He was a little corrupt and contemptible.
Merlin: No fears, no regrets, just a future with a promise.
Merlin: A future with a promise.
Merlin: Future with a promise.
John: A future with, oh, I get it.
John: I get what the promise is.
John: I get what the future is.
John: It's the promise of technology, John.
Merlin: It's the ability to get GMO foods into your grocery store via email.
John: See, this is an incredible technology of year zero.
John: You don't have to die.
John: You go up into space.
Hmm.
Merlin: like that that's really the first space travel is your soul going into space it's it's we kid but uh this does suffer from that same problem which is that you know we try you know when you're trying to like guide a kid to something you know is uh good useful timeless like even cool like it's so you can't help but sound like you're like an old man with a beetle wig when you're when you're trying to explain this stuff
Merlin: You should check out Johnny Tremaine.
Merlin: You should see what happens to this kid.
Merlin: Oh, boy, does he ever overcome disability in the most extreme way.
John: You know, our listeners may remember Brother Gabe, the Dominican monk, who is a regular listener to our program.
Merlin: He's in Portland now.
John: That's right.
John: Many of them don't realize that Brother Gabe has become Father Gabe within the scope of our podcast.
John: He's gone from a brr to a fur.
John: That's right.
John: Now he's a fur Gabe.
John: They gave him his own parish, I think.
John: They did.
John: Or maybe there's one priest with a grayer beard that's up the chain from him.
Merlin: I saw him at a bar.
Merlin: He's in his robes, as always, drinking a beer.
Merlin: I don't know how this guy gets so much dough.
Merlin: But I saw him at a bar in Portland.
Merlin: He's like, yeah, they totally gave me a church here.
Merlin: Oh, they gave him a whole church.
Merlin: He's not in Oakland anymore.
Merlin: They gave him that he got an upgrade.
John: He's not in Oakland anymore.
John: He's extreme.
Merlin: No fears, no regrets.
John: So he's going to be.
John: Can you carry these beads?
John: I didn't think so.
John: He's probably going to have a lot to say about the extremity.
John: The extremity of our Lord?
John: Yeah, I think the Bible he uses is still hand-illustrated and in Latin, and he does a real-time translation into English.
John: He could get a computer for that.
John: See?
John: You know, I do that all the time.
John: When people write me in foreign languages, I just go on the computer and write them back.
John: And that is a major change.
John: I will say that.
John: That's like, oh, yeah, I'm writing to you in Serbo-Croatian, which I'm sure now I'm going to get angry letters from Serbs and Croats.
John: Who are like, they're not the same language.
John: There's no Czechoslovakia anymore.
Merlin: You're talking about the Ukraine?
John: no don't say it oh god oh now i'm in trouble so actually that one makes a big difference i didn't realize what a big deal the definite article is with ukraine but that's a big deal it's a big deal have you come around to that absolutely i mean i've been i have been on i have been on their side uh ever since it was first explained to me it's just a bad habit i know i know you know it's just this terrible like oh anyway the ukraine and it's like
John: ah no but it took me a long time even to I absolutely like understood it it just took me so long to break the habit of Ukraine the Czech Republic although you do say that
Merlin: I got a burlitz to try to be able to talk to my stepfather.
Merlin: I got a Serbo-Croatian burlitz when I was about 12.
John: You're saying that your stepfather speaks Serbo-Croatian?
Merlin: First of all, he's fucking dead, thank God.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But yeah, no, I tried to learn a little bit.
Merlin: Tried to learn a little bit.
Merlin: Let's hear a little bit.
Merlin: Dobroveče, kakoste.
Merlin: Okay, I heard that already.
Merlin: That's all I remember.
Merlin: I was 12.
Merlin: I'll do you up some Spanish in a heartbeat.
Merlin: But, I mean, I don't feel the obligation to remember a lot of... He was a bad person.
Merlin: Very bad person.
Merlin: Dobry den.
John: Dobry den.
John: I used to say that all the time.
John: What does that mean?
John: That's like, hello.
John: Good day.
John: Good day.
John: But, you know, like I got to the point where I could... I greeted someone in Czech one time.
John: And they replied to me enthusiastically in Czech.
John: And I was like, oh, sorry.
John: I was just kidding.
John: I only know like seven words.
John: Oh, that must be so disappointing.
John: But then they were like, wow, your accent is incredible.
John: And I was like, not really.
John: I mean, I only know seven words.
John: And they were like, no, but you really got the accent.
John: So I said my seven words and they were like very impressed with my like monkey imitation of how they pronounce things.
John: And for a very brief moment,
John: I imagined myself learning Czech.
John: And I was like, nah.
John: I never learned German and that would have been actually practical.
Merlin: Something I do a lot, and I see a lot of my friends doing a lot.
Merlin: I don't see you doing so much.
Merlin: You're not a big recommender of media, I've noticed.
Merlin: And I know you like a lot.
Merlin: You have consumed and actually enjoy a lot of media.
Merlin: But I feel like I don't very often hear you wanting to pull somebody aside and say, like,
Merlin: check out this movie, check out this particular book from the Discworld series or whatever.
Merlin: I don't hear you pulling out specific... Is that by design?
Merlin: How does that work?
Merlin: Because you have a lot of opinions.
Merlin: You know a lot of stuff.
Merlin: Are you not a big recommender of media?
John: I'm not.
John: And it's because I...
John: Early on, I understood there to be a tremendous difference between being a reader and being a fetishistic reader of lists of books.
John: And it came as a result of a conversation I overheard between two people who both presented themselves as extremely well-read.
John: And they were arguing...
John: with each other and by just essentially citing John 317 or 316 or whatever.
John: In the sense that they were saying like, oh yeah, that's interesting.
John: You know, that's just like this passage from Ulysses.
John: And then the other person would say, yeah, it really reminds me of blankety blank.
John: You know, the original translation of...
Merlin: This is a classic liberal arts problem.
Merlin: A classic liberal arts conversation is two people trying to out-duel each other on references, and nobody's ever allowed to say, I don't know what you're talking about or what that means.
John: Yeah, and they were just throwing book titles and authors at one another, and at the end of the conversation, there was no understanding had taken place.
John: It was not a conversation about ideas.
Merlin: This was actually discussed at length by Italo Calvino.
John: Oh, really?
John: No, I just made that up.
John: Well, that's very interesting because Umberto Eco had a passage about Calvino.
Merlin: Oh, I remember reading about that.
Merlin: It was something in the New Yorker about Borges I was reading.
John: Please go ahead.
John: I was reading the Times Literary Supplements the other day.
John: Oh, are you still reading that?
Merlin: About a book about Borges?
Merlin: That used to be so good.
Merlin: I'm so glad you can still enjoy that.
John: Anyway, it was infuriating because the initial jumping off point of the conversation was –
John: an idea and I really was excited about it the idea and I kept I kept waiting for someone to say something about it and and eventually like we were a thousand miles from that idea but had traversed no ground and no ideas had been shared and I realized like part of my education or a large part of it was just my own way of finding a path through ideas and
John: If you walk into not even a large library, but just someone's home library where it's floor-to-ceiling books on three walls, that's more books than you could possibly read in a lifetime.
John: And so there's so much emphasis on here's the 10 books you need to read or here's the 10 books that this smart guy recommends that
John: And really what you're doing when you're doing that is missing the opportunity for you to find your 10 books.
John: And there's no such thing as a book that isn't useful, even a book that you hate or a book that you throw on the ground.
John: Like if you read two chapters of a book and you're like, this is garbage and you throw it away, that was just as useful as reading a book all the way through in terms of you discovering your own taste and you finding your own intellectual path.
John: So there was a crucial moment in my life where I had a friend whose mother taught a course on the novel at a university.
John: And I was very poor.
John: So when he was done reading the books that his mother was forcing her students to read, he would pitch those books to me.
John: And it was basically just one professor's reading list.
John: It was like I was taking her class.
John: But it came at precisely the moment when I didn't have money to buy books.
John: And so I had this steady stream of books.
John: But I was getting none of her interpretation.
John: I was not sitting in class discussing it with other students.
John: I was just getting these free books, right?
John: And so those books were leaping off points for me to go read other books like, what is this about?
John: Oh, I'm going to go chase this.
John: And it was all very personal.
John: So I really believe even when you are given a reading list that if you're not pursuing a personal journey, you're not getting an education.
John: Because chasing is the key element.
John: And so I'm very reluctant.
John: You know, when people are like, give me three books about World War II.
John: I'm like, there are so many books about World War II.
John: Start with the one in front of you.
John: Start with the first one.
John: Don't even go on Amazon and look for the one that has the best rating.
John: Find one and start reading it and then chase that trail.
John: Because it's yours.
John: It belongs to you.
John: And like my take on World War I, what interests me about it and the Balfour Declaration and the life that I have spent chasing the ramifications of the Balfour Declaration and how that changed the world and we're still –
John: We're in a world that is absolutely a product of that.
John: And that was a product of World War I. That's mine.
John: And that may not be what you take away from World War I. You may take a different thing and chase your own dragon.
John: So that's why I don't recommend media even when people address me directly and say, please tell me where I should go.
John: Because it's obvious where you should go.
John: You just start and chase.
John: Um, because I don't, because the thing that I hate the most is this kind of monoculture of situations where everybody's seen the same thing.
John: Everybody's seen the same thing and everybody has read enough reviews on the internet that they know what their take on it should be.
John: And so there's not enough, there aren't enough situations where people are saying, well, you know what?
John: That's not what I got out of that book at all.
John: that people have forgotten how to trust their own instincts.
John: And, you know, and the example of this is at a certain point, everybody agreed that the Eagles suck and everybody was reading the same critical art or all the cool kids were reading the same articles where people initially were, were advancing a pretty, uh, you know, like a pretty contra argument.
John: The Eagles greatest hits is the best selling album of all time.
Um,
John: And so super easy in the 80s to write an article saying, actually, the Eagles are garbage.
John: And then that became a thing that you could not argue against.
John: You know, a real group thing.
John: Yeah.
John: So that even now, when Glenn Frey died, there were all these reflection pieces that were like, well, he sucked and his band sucked, but...
John: I still kind of feel like he sucked and I, and now he's dead.
John: And so I can't really like, this is sort of a, a thing I'm writing to commemorate that, but he's really intolerable.
John: And it was just like, wow.
John: So now the, the really radical stance to take is like, I liked the Eagles.
John: And that's just a product, I think, of people just having reading lists that are too small.
Merlin: And something that runs through all these also is, in my mind, is this implicit... Well, first of all, let me just bracket by saying, one thing I think is very useful to people, can be very useful, and I don't know if we agree or disagree on this, but I think it can be useful to give somebody a starting point with something.
Merlin: So with comics, for example, I will frequently say, check out this comic or that comic.
Merlin: Watch them.
Merlin: Huh?
Merlin: Watchmen.
Merlin: Maybe not the best place to start.
Merlin: But there are comics out there.
Merlin: But the thing is, I will also ask them.
Merlin: I'll say, like, okay, well, like, what kinds of, like, novels do you enjoy?
Merlin: What TV shows do you like?
Merlin: Not just for theme.
Merlin: Not just for, like, do you like Vikings or space people?
Merlin: But along the lines of what kind of stories do you like?
Merlin: Because just because you like science fiction is no guarantee you're going to like Stephen Moffat's Doctor Who.
Merlin: That's going to be more like, you know, do you like switcheroos and change-em-ups?
John: Ah, switcheroos.
Merlin: switchers and change them up and so i try to take all that in being the person who's going to advise you where to start i want to take all that into consideration um and so i think that can be helpful but with that said i think i feel like sometimes there's in this in this age there's something kind of implicit for a long time we called it the canon like you don't want to not know about something in the canon because you look like a dummy so like you should read tom sawyer
Merlin: Well, or like, you know, whatever.
Merlin: Like if somebody starts talking about the old man in the sea, you wouldn't be able to nod along and go, oh, yes, mm-hmm, oh, yes, yes, yes.
Merlin: But I think sometimes I feel like maybe what you might be pushing back against, I can't speak for you, but is this Cliff Notes problem of people – it sounds like they're saying, what books should I read?
Merlin: What books should I read?
Merlin: But there's always this part of me that wants to say that feels like, well –
Merlin: there's also, there's this tendency to say like, what book should I be able to say that I've read?
Merlin: Which is a different, which is a different thing altogether.
Merlin: And what, you know, again, thinking about the way one discovers a book or a movie or a whatever accidentally.
Merlin: And, you know, every, anybody who's a nerd,
Merlin: or a geek can talk about having like an extreme attachment to most other people don't like at all or consider to be the worst of that particular kind of thing.
Merlin: But you have a special affection for it because it was yours and you discovered that and you always have that.
Merlin: And even as your critical faculties...
Merlin: theoretically grow you might still always enjoy that one even though you may not think it's the best one but you can't know that unless you've sort of discovered it the problem is if you go into it loaded for bear and you've you've read this wikipedia article you've read the the top 10 novels you need to read before you die you've seen these lists and all these things you know that like there's certain things that you can name check that most people in the room are going to a agree with
Merlin: and are B going to make you sound cool that you said that and that you didn't say that.
Merlin: So if you say, even though the Eagles had one of the greatest selling albums of all time, several of them probably, it's not cool to say you like the Eagles because at some point we all agreed that they weren't cool.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: So that's part of it is that when you...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't want to feed into that.
Merlin: I've certainly been guilty of that.
Merlin: I've gone and scurried to go learn about something as much as anybody else has.
Merlin: But when you're talking about something that feels, especially if it feels special to you, you can't replicate the experience of having discovered something by having somebody hand you a list with three things on it and say, these are the three things you should know to name check.
John: Yeah.
John: The example that I always come back to is the Israel-Palestine problem.
John: Like really thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive people can disagree passionately about what that problem is, right?
John: What even constitutes that problem?
Merlin: Well, what constitutes the constellation of those problems.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: It's like trying to explain South Africa.
Merlin: Like, you think you understand South Africa?
Merlin: Go talk to our friend Grant.
Merlin: It's always been way more complicated than anybody realized.
John: Yeah, infinitely complicated.
John: And so your jumping off point for the Israeli-Palestinian problem, in a lot of ways, is your moral education.
John: Right?
John: Like, you can read a thousand books about it.
John: And depending, you know, you, you are going to have your opinion either confirmed or you're going to disagree or, I mean, like the, like the number of, of entrance points to that argument.
John: In a lot of ways, it's very hard for me even to imagine how you would educate someone on it that wasn't deeply personal because there are so many factors in play.
John: And a lot of them are a product of books that you read a long, long time before and how you responded to your nursery rhymes in a way.
John: And so, you know, last night I was watching a mini series about Carlos the Jackal.
John: And I was doing that because that's what I think is fun.
John: Is this Narcos?
John: No, no, no.
John: Carlos the Jackal, completely other... Not related to Narcos at all.
John: Carlos the Jackal was a...
John: Well, I guess he was one of the people that invented terrorism.
John: Well, he was a terrorist that went through every stage.
John: Like he started in the 60s.
John: He wasn't arrested finally until 1994.
John: And he pioneered a lot of terrorism.
John: A lot of different kinds of terrorism.
John: I mean, he was there at the start when hijacking planes was still fun.
John: And he was fighting for the Palestinian cause and also for the cause of global revolution.
John: And this miniseries is there sort of glamorizing him and making him, he's very sexy and he's the hero of this film.
John: And played by a sexy actor.
John: And because it was made by French television, it shows his penis.
John: And so you go, you know, there is a way to watch it where you become very sympathetic to the idea of throwing a grenade into a cafe.
John: Because this is, you know, this is your protagonist.
John: And to watch it is to suggest either that you begin reading backwards.
John: You know, you start at the White Album and then you listen to Sgt.
John: Pepper and then you listen to Rubber Soul and you go back to Jerry Lee Lewis.
John: You know, you have to do that to make any sense of this, what's happening.
John: in Carlos the Jackal.
John: And then you start reading forward after you've read backwards.
John: Then you have to start reading forward from there.
John: And that's a very involved and personal journey, right?
John: I mean, if you're starting off, because there are a lot of people wearing Palestinian scarves on their college campus who have been given an opinion about it.
John: by their professor or their friends or whoever stopped them on campus and handed them a flyer.
John: And that was their entrance point into having a feeling about it.
John: And then that's going to really determine how you read everything else.
John: And hard to imagine that...
John: Whatever that first sort of black and white opinion you developed, hard to imagine that it's ever really going to be affected by the evidence because it's so intractable.
John: But there are so many depths of opinion you can have about it.
John: And one of them is to stand in your quad and yell about it.
John: And one of them is to have read 80 books.
John: So I don't know.
John: I would like people to have read the 80 books that I've read, but I would also like people to have read 80 different books.
John: And I honestly don't know how to, because I think you're right.
John: There are a lot of ways...
John: I guess I don't want to shape, I don't want to shape people who are interested in me in a way that makes them acolytes, you know?
John: So anyway, yeah, I don't, I don't recommend a lot of, of media.
John: And, and maybe that's, maybe that's not, maybe that's not good.
John: Maybe I should.
John: Part of it is I don't know where to start.
John: And I don't know why you would be interested in the Balfour Declaration the first time you read about it.
John: I don't know how you would see it and understand what it represented.
Merlin: Well, I don't know how much you're sandbagging here, but... And I'm not sure I know what sandbagging is.
John: Is that where you prevent a river from overflowing?
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: It's a little bit like hustling.
Merlin: It's a little bit like acting like you aren't as good at something as you are, right?
Merlin: By which I just mean that, well, I hope you can understand that when you listen to somebody else talk about something that you don't know about or you don't know a lot about or you don't have an opinion that you are particularly attached to,
Merlin: I mean, just think about how much of what we do in a given—most people, including me, in a given month is like listening to what other people have to say about something.
Merlin: And in this case, you're talking about, in some cases, some stuff that—if you're talking about World War II or whatever, that people know some stuff about, but they never thought about it in the way that you put it.
Merlin: You seem like a pretty intelligent guy, and you've got a point of view about it.
Merlin: I don't think it's unusual at all to say, huh, I'd like to be a little bit smarter about that.
Merlin: Where should I start?
Huh.
John: Well, yeah, but what got me into World War II was A, my dad fought in it, and B, the planes and the boats and the trucks and the tanks were cool.
John: Like, I think when you talk about high water marks, there was never a cooler set of gear.
John: And as a kid, like...
John: When F-4 Phantoms were flying all around my house, I was much more interested in the F-4U Navy airplane that took off from aircraft carriers and fought over Corregidor just because I loved the planes.
John: And I would get these books about World War II planes and I would look at them and I would learn about them and I just thought they were rad.
John: Yeah.
John: And through that, through thinking the planes were read, I read enough of those books that I started to say, oh, shit, you know, World War Two, what's going on here?
John: It's not just, you know, it's not just Hitler and Yamamoto.
John: It's like, who are all these other characters and read about them?
John: And then.
John: Then I got confused and I watched the winds of war.
John: And then having watched the winds of war, I read the winds of war.
John: And so then I became conversant in World War II and World War I looked so boring.
John: So boring.
John: They just sat in muddy trenches for years with helmets that had little spikes on them.
John: And every once in a while, somebody got hung up in some barbed wire.
John: And it was just like yawn city.
John: And I avoided learning about World War I for a long, long time because it was just so dull.
John: They had no cool planes.
John: Like Eddie Rickenbacker up there in a plane made of balsa wood?
John: Yawn.
John: But the more I learned about World War II, the more I didn't understand.
John: The more I learned about Hitler, the more I didn't understand.
John: And eventually all arrows pointed to World War I. And I didn't want to learn about it.
John: I didn't want to read about World War I. God, what is a bunch of...
John: A bunch of people riding into battle on horseback and getting cut down by machine guns.
John: Nothing about that is fun.
John: But then I read about it and started to realize that
John: that what was interesting about World War I was that it was, it was the 19th century colliding with the 20th century and all these empires collide, you know, washing up on the shore of modernity.
John: And then I had to go back and learn about the empires, you know, and that, that was like me reluctantly the whole time just kicking and screaming, I don't want to learn about Prussia.
John: What does that have to do with anything?
John: There are no even airplanes.
John: And then I'm reading about the 30 years war, which if you want to talk about boring, it's not that the 30 years war was boring.
John: It's that the scholarship about it is boring.
John: And, you know, it's always chapter after chapter about salting the fields.
John: And why is the king of Sweden involved?
John: You know, and then it's back.
John: And then it's back.
John: Then the wave washes back.
John: So to say to anybody like, you know, here's the book about World War I you should read.
John: I didn't get there that way.
John: I got there through loving airplanes.
John: So I can't divorce that.
John: I can't divorce that whole long walk and then walking back and then walking this way and walking that way from that initial beginning of like,
John: And just being a kid sitting cross-legged in the library reading about these cool things.
John: And I guess that's how I found my way into every single thing I ever read.
John: And it feels so individual.
John: that at every book I recommend, I feel this enormous responsibility to recommend the 10 books that should come in advance of it.
John: And it feels a little bit like the long version of The Godfather where I'm trying to put these movies that I watched that were narratively all broken up and trying to put them in some kind of chronological order.
John: And so then I'm like, well, you have to start reading a book about the 30 Years War, which is literally the most boring thing I ever read.
John: So you're not going to want to do that.
Merlin: Yeah, but it's kind of a similar point to talking about Palestine and Israel, or however you choose to frame that, is that the first thing you want to almost recommend that you can't recommend is to start with the state of mind that I had, which I don't want you to have, but to take the journey that I did, you must first start with the state of mind that I had, which I could not replicate for you, and I wouldn't even recommend it if I could.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And you wonder where people are on that.
John: Do you still like cool planes?
John: Is that why you're interested in World War II?
John: Is it cool planes?
John: Because I can tell you what to read about cool planes.
John: But where are you coming into it?
John: Are you coming into it having watched Band of Brothers and you want to know more?
John: That's fascinating too.
John: But by the time I watched Band of Brothers, I had all this context that made that
John: that made that miniseries really sing to me if that was the first thing i'd experienced about world war ii you know i would i would just jump off from there like go like figure out who major winters was and what he was like when he was a lieutenant i love that series so great it's so amazing and everything in it like when you're getting to the point where there is in the ardennes
Merlin: Is that when they have the really the tough winter in the forest?
John: And the bombs coming in.
Merlin: But, you know, the thing is you go and if you're like me, you're sitting there and looking at Wikipedia while you're watching it.
Merlin: And there's not a there's not a lick of exaggeration in what's happening.
Merlin: It's exactly as awful as it looked.
John: It's so it's so incredible.
John: And that's and there are 50 movies about D-Day and and and about Battle of the Bulge.
John: which is the absolute last thing that's happening in that war where already six million Russian soldiers have died.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You're starting in the third act of the war.
Merlin: That's the wrong place to come in on that play.
John: Yeah, and the United States really plays a small role in the war in terms of fighting battles.
Yeah.
John: Like the Battle of Stalingrad, there aren't 50 movies about.
John: But, you know, talk about brutality.
John: But the thing about D-Day is it's so fantastic.
John: These guys and these little folks.
Merlin: I was explaining this to my daughter.
Merlin: Did you see the photo I just sent you?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Oh, my daughter, I sent you a photo on your phone.
Merlin: Oh, on my phone.
Merlin: Oh, shit.
Merlin: That's a whole other technology than what I'm sitting in front.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: Well, anyway, the important thing to know is that my daughter went for her brownie troop, went to an aviation museum and she's really into planes now.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: Yeah, you can see here where she's, my wife calls me over and to look at her door, she's got a chalkboard on her door and it now says, home to Amelia Earhart and has a plane hanging from it.
Merlin: And she comes out and she goes, yeah, just so you know, I'm going to be into this for like a year.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: But she was so excited.
Merlin: And so we've been talking a lot about planes and about, you know, aeronautics aviation.
Merlin: And I told her your dad's story about Zero.
Merlin: And how it may or may not be exactly true.
Merlin: But I told her that story.
Merlin: But what was my point?
Merlin: Talking to her about D-Day.
Merlin: And I was trying to explain D-Day to her.
Merlin: And like...
Merlin: uh, and, but just how improbable so much of D-Day was to just, you know, and it's like, like I've said a bunch of times and I know people, there are people, older people who disagree with this.
Merlin: I've argued with my, my mother-in-law about this, but like just that sense of like, if you came in on the movie, let's say if you, if you're learning about world war two and you left off, what?
Merlin: And midway, like if you, at some point in like say 43, there's no guarantee that this was going to end great for America.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Just, I mean, I think that if there's anything to take away, and I don't mean to give advice here, is just to remember, like, how bad it seemed and how entirely possible it seemed at a certain point that we were going to lose and we were going to lose big.
Merlin: And just to know about, like, what went into, like, all of the, like, all the different drives to try and get the resources, what people in America were foregoing to go to the troops.
Merlin: And it's just, it's a story that as many times as it's told is still incredibly moving to me.
Merlin: how we kept at it, especially England, my God, but how we kept at it even when stuff got so, so very terrible.
Merlin: And then, like, you can't really appreciate how awesome the whole D-Day thing is unless you appreciate what a crapshoot it was.
Merlin: There's no way a plan that huge could work and not be discovered and work.
Merlin: It's mind-boggling.
John: And you're exactly right because...
John: Because so often now the first thing you understand about the Battle of Midway was that it was the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
John: And it's like here, the Battle of Midway was the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
John: And so you go, oh, okay, really?
John: And you watch every, you learn about it as a fait accompli.
John: Yeah.
John: And really, it was a totally random series of happy accidents, incredible luck and like awesome risk taking.
John: Right.
John: I mean, the risks involved, the people who were flying on empty gas tanks.
John: to at the last possible minute, look down through the clouds and see a task force and radio it in and just be like, wow, what?
John: Go, go, go.
Merlin: Because at this point, at this point, weren't the Japanese still just basically kicking our ass in the air?
John: Oh, they were kicking our ass everywhere.
John: I mean, they were kicking our ass in, you know, Malaysia and Indonesia and Philippines and they were just, they were ruling.
John: And we were like, most of our fleet was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
John: And we just, you know, and this is the thing, like American pluck.
John: I mean, it's part of our foundation myth almost, actually.
John: But, yeah, you have to read about that stuff with that sense of, like, this could go either way in a big way.
John: We are the underdogs here, and that's what's so great about it.
John: But, like, when D-Day started...
John: when they, when they made those landings, they didn't know that Hitler was, Hitler had gone insane.
John: They didn't really, I mean, they knew that the Russians were, were pushing back and they knew that that was the strategy, but they didn't know that the chain of command in the Nazi army had broken down and that Hitler was acting as his own
John: general and not taking any advice from his soldiers.
John: Right.
John: So now we look at that and we're like, oh, well shit, there wasn't any way we could lose, but that's, you know, that's not how they thought.
John: And, and yeah, all that home front stuff.
John: I mean, how many books have you read about it?
John: How, how many different times did you have a aha moment?
John: I'm still reading books like, like that, the meaning of Hitler where it's a palm slap to the forehead.
John: Wow.
John: Huh?
John: I never thought of that.
John: I never in all the years of reading about this stuff had that moment.
John: And I don't know what it would have been like if I had read the meaning of Hitler first.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
John: So, yeah, I'm confused by it.
John: And eventually, like, how do you – because –
John: I'm so thrilled that Eleanor likes airplanes.
John: Yeah.
John: And because that's the entrance.
John: She got the little helmet and the goggles and the whole nine.
John: That's the entrance to so much for me.
John: Airplanes were the gateway drug for my whole education.
John: And the different ways that people could enter into, I mean, you know, if the first thing you read is House of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice,
John: you're going to follow such an incredibly different and amazing path and I envy you.
John: And I would never want to interrupt that by saying, read this book about airplanes.
John: In a way, you know what I mean?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And that's part of the weird, weird gender specificity of culture that, you know, that,
John: And I don't understand the process of how much of it is self-selecting, how much of it is imposed.
John: But Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret was a book that a lot of people in my fifth grade class read and talked about.
John: And I read it.
John: secretly because no boys were supposed to read it.
John: Oh, are you there?
John: It's me.
John: Margaret was for girls only.
John: And this was before the, the gender division of toys and stuff.
John: You know, did you read that article where it was like in 1975?
John: 80% of toys were non-genderized.
Merlin: I remember very much that being true for things like games.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There would be extremities.
Merlin: You'd have the pink dolly stuff over here and the machine gun stuff over here, but there was a lot more stuff that was, for lack of a better word, unisex.
John: Yeah, like here's a ball.
John: You want to play a game with a ball?
John: If you want to play four square with it or you want to play soccer or you want to play kickball.
John: No, no, no.
John: You got to choose.
John: You can play war ball or nurse ball.
John: Yeah.
John: Exactly.
John: But here's a ball.
John: And now every ball has either Frozen or G.I.
John: Joe stenciled on it.
John: But in fifth grade, boys did not read Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret.
John: And I did because I was curious about it and I like to read books.
John: And so all the girl books where it was like, oh my God, she got her period for the first time.
John: i i read and was like i don't know what that is but that's but i'm i'm happy for her or am i meant to be sad for her i don't know and it didn't you know that that didn't that knowledge didn't turn me into uh the world's greatest lover it turned me into somebody that was that was wondering when i was going to get my