Ep. 190: "Omertà of the Sea"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: They ask us not to read an ad, so hey, enjoy the show.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Great.
John: Good.
John: All right.
John: Yep.
John: Super duper.
John: How about you?
John: Great.
John: Let's just wrap it up.
John: All right.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Good times.
John: Nothing to talk about then.
John: Thanks for tuning in again.
John: Yeah.
John: Thanks for coming to our normally complaining about stuff podcast.
John: We are super good right now.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Wouldn't that be funny?
Merlin: That would be funny if we just had a week where everything was okay.
Merlin: Can you imagine that?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Nothing intolerable.
Merlin: You've had worse months.
John: Everybody was driving fine.
John: Didn't think about Hitler once.
John: On the way in today, I passed.
John: There was a small traffic jam, but not one that I was upset about because the source of it was that a cop had pulled over
John: A lime green Lamborghini Diablo.
Merlin: Oh, that's okay.
Merlin: And everybody had to slow down to see it.
Merlin: And I was like, yeah, of course, of course.
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: So that person who, whoever paid for that car probably got to choose from many, many colors.
John: Well, yeah, many, yeah, many colors.
Merlin: I mean, even if they'll say, let's say, I mean, red, white and black and yellow, red, white.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: But like, let's assume even you get three colors and you pick lime green.
Merlin: That's just, you know, boy, you talk about a fuck you to everybody.
Merlin: It's like, did you notice I'm driving a Lamborghini Diablo?
John: Did you notice?
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: That's a nice car to get pulled over in.
Merlin: I bet it's very luxurious.
John: Well, you know, I can't imagine that you would ever get out of first gear in town.
John: And if you were the type of person that would drive one around town.
John: Like, that's the thing about a car like that, right?
John: You don't drive it around town.
John: You drive it, you get it out of town.
John: You take it out on the Steinberger, say.
John: What's it called?
Merlin: What's that road you go on in Germany?
John: Yeah, the Steinberger, say.
John: The Rennsteig.
John: The Rheingold.
Merlin: It's the Rheingold.
John: The Ringscheisse.
John: The Ringscheisse.
John: Yeah, the Nürnbergringer.
Merlin: Nürnbergring.
Merlin: Nürnbergring.
Merlin: Yeah, I have a couple friends who've driven on the Nürburgring.
Merlin: Our friend Marco has.
Merlin: Marco has driven on the Nürburgring.
John: In his M7 or his M9 or his M12.
Merlin: Yeah, it's a pretty nice car.
Merlin: I'm given to believe it's a pretty nice car.
Merlin: Have you never been in it?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I mean, I wouldn't even know how to dress for something like that.
I think.
Merlin: It probably makes you wear something like inside-out sweatpants, something that won't mar the seats, I'm guessing.
John: Oh, inside-out sweatpants.
John: Maybe a little sheepskin-like ass chap.
Merlin: Sheepskin ass chaps?
John: Yeah.
John: You know, everybody says, oh, assless chaps, and then all the pedants are like... But what about just a straight-up, just the missing part of a set of chaps?
Merlin: Like a donut hole?
John: Yeah, like a little, just little ass and front pelt.
Merlin: Yeah, like maybe you don't want the weight and performance characteristics of full-on chaps.
Merlin: Maybe you just want the part where your ass would normally stick out.
Merlin: Maybe you're modest.
Merlin: Maybe you want to go to a parade and ride on a float, but you don't want your butt cheeks out there.
John: Yeah, chaps are meant, if you're on a horse and your horse brushes up against another horse or a cow or a fence...
John: Which a horse is want to do, right?
John: A horse is trying to knock you off.
John: They're just doing the best they can, John.
John: They're doing the best they can.
John: And if they see a low-hanging branch or a cow, they're going to get up on it and hope that they can knock you off.
John: And that's why you have chaps on, right?
John: To keep your pant legs from getting abraded or something.
John: I don't know why you wear chaps, frankly.
Merlin: I bet there's lots of reasons.
Merlin: I mean, it's sort of like you're describing.
Merlin: It's sort of like why you would wear gloves.
Merlin: There's all kinds of things you're going to encounter that could take a chunk out of you.
Merlin: Brush.
Merlin: Let's say brush.
Merlin: There's probably a lot of brush.
John: It's probably very coarse, pointy at parts.
John: Pointy brush.
John: But what is the equivalent if you're riding around in Marco Arment's M5?
John: You don't need to protect you.
John: You need to protect the car.
John: And so you have some sheepskin reverse chaps.
John: which I guess we're just going to call ass chaps, right?
John: Or like, you know, loincloth chaps.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I think that would be a skirt.
John: Well, except you don't want it on the side.
John: You want it to be cool and breezy on the side.
John: You're not touching the car on the side.
John: You just want it in the back to give a nice buff to the leather seats.
Merlin: It's not too much to ask.
John: I don't know why you'd want it in the front, just for a comfortable place to rest your hands.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know if you want to be looking at somebody's wang while you're driving around in your BMW.
John: Exactly.
John: Exactly.
John: Right.
John: So it's more of a, it's like a ass.
John: It's a, it's a, it's like a polishing rag on the bottom.
Merlin: Oh, I get it.
John: And a modesty skirt on the front.
Merlin: Right, like a BMW Berka.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Berka would be a great name for a BMW, by the way.
Merlin: The Berka?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Have you tried the new?
Merlin: Have you taken out on the Steinbergenstrasse?
John: Oh, you're going to get letters.
Merlin: Yeah, I sure am.
Merlin: I sure am.
Merlin: What was I going to ask you about?
Merlin: Yeah, so you got the Germans.
Merlin: You got Marco Armin over here.
Merlin: Honka, honka, honka.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No soup, no soup.
Merlin: So you've been traveling.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, I've done a lot of traveling.
John: I'm not done yet because as you know, the life of an artist is the life of an eternal vacation basically.
John: So I've just been on two major warm weather vacations and now I'm going on a lengthy ski trip.
John: uh it's a i can't defend it really yeah i don't i don't produce anything worthwhile uh for the world right i'm like i'm like don't feel like you need to defend that john i'm like a game designer except i don't even design games yeah that's true you add as much value though right i mean you know what a we right here's paper hat my daughter's my daughter's favorite video game right now
Merlin: is a game where you stare at this same area of a backyard of a house, and you try to make cats come into the yard.
Merlin: A thing which you would never do in real life.
Merlin: Right.
John: You don't want cats in your yard.
Merlin: You wait for cats to come, and then you try to attract the cats, and then that gives you the opportunity.
Merlin: I don't exactly understand.
Merlin: I don't claim to understand the game.
Merlin: I know it is primarily about collecting cats.
Merlin: You get pictures of them and stuff.
Merlin: But then also, I think your reward for attracting cats is...
Merlin: You're given the opportunity to buy goods, virtual goods inside the game that enable you to attract more cats.
John: Sure, sure.
John: She loves it.
John: I'm wondering now that you say this, I've always been very curious about bird watchers.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Because they're out there.
Merlin: I always figured it was a cover or a front for something else.
John: Well, yeah, me too.
John: But the more I look into it.
John: the more it seems that they are just out watching birds.
John: Gathering... Here's what they're gathering.
John: Having watched a bird.
John: They're collecting the experience of having seen a bird.
John: Yeah, and different birds.
John: So they're like, did you ever... Have you ever seen...
John: Uh, uh, spotted throated war.
Merlin: So yeah, sure.
Merlin: The, the, the throated war hog.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: The war, war, war, war, warbling, war blob.
John: And the other person goes, yes.
John: And then they both have collected having seen it.
John: And that's very interesting to me.
John: And they're not in the bird watchers and the bird photographers are different people too.
John: So they're not even watch.
John: They're not even collecting, having taken a picture of a thing.
Merlin: I've never had an opportunity to talk about this, and I haven't actually thought about it that much.
Merlin: But as you get older, you start to realize that there are, what, euphemisms.
Merlin: For example, euphemisms, there are existential euphemisms.
Merlin: For example, like, let's say you look for opportunities, like for my wife, I think, I think
Merlin: So going to the gym or going to yoga is very much about going to the gym and going to yoga.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: But it's also that she's not with us.
Merlin: Like she gets an hour to herself or two hours or you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And just like dad saying, oh, we're out of milk.
Merlin: I'm happy to go to the store and get some milk because you get a second to yourself and maybe you can smoke a cigarette.
John: Yeah, like my grandfather said, I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes and he didn't come back for 15 years.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Sort of like that.
Merlin: It's a lot like that.
Merlin: And so I don't know why, but as I got older, I started to think, it's not that I can't imagine why someone would do birdwatching.
Merlin: It just, it seems a little obscure.
Merlin: And it's one of those things like gorilla costumes or quicksand in the 70s where it came up so often that even as weird as it was, you're like, is there that much quicksand in the world?
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: You are really nailing something here.
Merlin: Have you talked about this before?
Merlin: I've mentioned it in other places.
Merlin: I'm not the only person.
Merlin: Actually, I heard a podcast a few years ago about what happened to quicksand, because quicksand was everywhere.
Merlin: It was.
Merlin: I was terrified of quicksand.
Merlin: It seemed like it lurked around every corner.
Merlin: There was certainly a period of probably half a year where I would avoid sand, because given the exposure in the media, I had to assume that there was quicksand out there I just didn't know about, and also people in gorilla suits.
Merlin: Well, that's true.
Merlin: I expected that, though.
Merlin: And birthday party clowns.
Merlin: Oh, I still never met anybody who actually looks forward to meeting a clown.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: But we were sold a bill of goods, John.
Merlin: We were led to believe that there was a clown culture out there that somebody liked.
Merlin: And I've never met anybody who wasn't a clown.
Merlin: Who actually liked a clown.
John: See, I don't mind clowns, but I had a traumatic clown experience as a child.
John: Oh, God.
John: But I'm wondering how quick Stan fits into the Bermuda Triangle Bigfoot Loch Ness Monster.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: The In Search Of era.
John: Yeah, like, how did quicksand factor into that?
John: That's so interesting.
John: Because it seems contemporaneous.
Merlin: Well, you're also, you're totally nailing this.
Merlin: Like, there was this period where there has to be a reason why this was.
Merlin: And maybe it was, like, post-hippie, like, pre-New Age America was very interested in all kinds of, like, wackadoodle concepts about... Remember, there was that period, even before In Search Of, there was that time-life set of books.
Merlin: But there's all this interest in aliens...
Merlin: about, you know, the ETs coming to visit us.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Secret Nazi weapons.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Underground or underwater kingdoms.
Merlin: You got the Sasquatch.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You got the Bigfoot.
Merlin: Loch Ness Monster.
Merlin: It was everywhere.
John: I think this is part of the appeal now that we're talking about it of the original Indiana Jones movie.
John: Oh.
John: Remember, we all went into that movie.
John: It's got a lot of those elements.
John: Yeah.
John: And we were, as 10-year-old kids, 12-year-old kids, we were primed
John: to think that there were little secret Mayan temples full of gold idols and secret Nazi weapons.
Merlin: Secret Nazi weapons.
Merlin: You've also got sort of like the whole religious cult supernatural component that leads into the Nazis.
Merlin: Yes, yes.
John: It's all baked into the Bermuda Triangle scene.
Merlin: Now, they had snakes in that.
Merlin: I don't remember there being quicksand.
Merlin: But also, you know, quicksand is also a fetish.
Merlin: There are quicksand fetishists.
John: Really?
Merlin: There are people who think it's a sexy thing for some people.
Merlin: I get that.
Merlin: I get that.
Merlin: So you grew up with enough of something on TV and you're going to want to masturbate to it eventually.
Merlin: Quicksand figures prominently in The Princess Bride.
Merlin: In The Princess Bride.
Merlin: Oh, it's the... And you got the eels.
Merlin: You got the... Oh, that's right.
Merlin: Yeah, you're right.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't understand it.
John: I'm still trying to parse it.
John: This is coming up more and more.
John: You know, I was just on a cruise.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And we were invited to visit the bridge, which I had never been invited to the bridge before.
John: I just imagine it was a computer.
John: That's not, huh?
John: No, there are sailors up there in various uniforms.
John: And there's a captain.
John: And in our case, he was a ship captain from Winnipeg, which right away, that should ring some alarm bells.
Hmm.
Merlin: Is that a landlocked area, John?
John: Yeah.
John: Winnipeg doesn't.
John: It's not where a lot of sea captains are.
John: He doesn't have the sea in his veins.
John: Normally, when you meet a sea captain, he's either from the Netherlands or from the Netherlands.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: They're all from the Netherlands.
Merlin: The Netherlands or from Greece.
Merlin: So all the boats, all the boats.
Merlin: It's like, don't boats have their own Delaware?
Merlin: Isn't there a Delaware of boats?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You always register in... In Bimini or...
Merlin: what is it?
Merlin: There's one place where everybody registers.
Merlin: I think it's the Delaware of Boats.
Merlin: Nassau.
Merlin: Something like that.
Merlin: And then you get your boat and you act like it's from the Delaware of Boats and then you hire some tall blonde guy to run your boat because he's always a Netherlander.
John: Yeah.
John: The Netherlanders grow up basically knee deep in water.
John: And that's how they become ship captains because it's the only way they can keep their feet dry.
John: Get up onto a boat and your feet will dry out eventually.
John: The Greeks also, there are a lot of islands there and they're all avid sailors.
John: But this guy's Canadian, so okay.
John: I mean, obviously the Canadians have a lot of sailors, but not from Winnipeg.
Merlin: But they don't have any boats, right?
Merlin: What, in Canada?
Merlin: Well, you got that area on the East Coast where they got a boat.
John: All sailors, no boats.
Merlin: But you don't, all sailors, no boats.
Merlin: Too many sailors and not enough boats.
Merlin: But I mean, is there like a large amount of Navy in say, like Saskatoon, is that a place in Canada?
Merlin: Yeah, but there's no Navy there.
Merlin: Do you get the Navy in Toronto?
John: You're not going to have a lot of Navy, although there's a lake, you'd have a Lake Navy.
John: Oh, and heroin.
John: Yeah, you'd have the old heroin navy.
John: But, you know, Canada's navy is very important because Canada needs to protect its Arctic seaways.
Merlin: Oh, like way up there.
Merlin: Oh, boy, that is a gig I would not want.
Merlin: Well, yeah, except, see, this is the thing about the Arctic.
Merlin: Unless you're avoiding quicksand.
Merlin: There's probably not a lot of quicksand when you go up that north.
John: You don't know what's up there.
John: Well, like the frozen over quicksand.
John: Well, but as the ice recedes, there might be A, alien civilizations.
Merlin: B. That's where you're going to find it.
John: Bermuda Triangles.
Merlin: Yes.
John: Bigfoots.
John: Quick ice.
John: Quick ice.
John: Quick sand.
John: Mayan temples.
John: It could all be up there.
John: A lot of room, a lot of territory.
John: I think the coastline of Canada is like the longest coastline in the world or something like that because it just is all crazy up there.
John: Because of Mandelbrot.
John: Well, also, yeah.
John: No true Scotsman.
John: But all the nations of the world are now trying to scoot in and out of these Canadian areas.
John: because the sea ice has receded and there's oil up there.
John: And so Canada's got a whole Navy that's all worried about that.
John: They're not worried about pot smuggling anymore because it's all coming from Canada.
John: Anyway, so this guy's from Winnipeg.
John: And here's the rub.
John: Are you ready?
John: Ready.
John: Here's why I got to go tour the bridge.
John: Because the captain, who's 65 years old, is an enormous Wil Wheaton fan.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: And he hears Wil Wheaton is on his boat, and he's like, I've got to meet Wil Wheaton.
John: Bring him to the bridge.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Did they ever make that whistle noise?
John: Well, so, of course, Will has the communicator sound.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: On his phone.
Merlin: I'm putting this together now.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: And he was on the Star Trek in the 80s.
Merlin: That's correct.
John: Yeah, 80s.
Merlin: I think it was when I was in college.
Merlin: He was on the Star Trek, and he played Beverly Crusher, and he was the guy who had the crab face, right?
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And now he likes cats.
John: He, I thought, was the one, didn't he talk like a penguin and smoke a cigarette in a long sort of a pipe?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, right.
Merlin: That's Gaius Balfour.
Merlin: That's the name of the bartender who was in The Color Purple.
John: Well, and he's the reason that the Middle East is so unevenly divided.
Merlin: Well, I didn't want to bring it up here.
Merlin: But in any case.
Merlin: This is so great.
Merlin: He found out the guy from Star Trek is on his boat.
John: That's right.
John: And the first thing he says when we walk onto the bridge is he points to his captain's chair and he goes, we had that modeled off of the Enterprise.
John: And we all, you know, get a courtesy chuckle.
John: He's a super nice guy, super nice captain.
John: He walks us around.
John: As I say, Will's phone, periodically, he would get a text and it would make the communicator sound.
John: And the captain would, like, titter.
John: Would he giggle?
John: He would.
John: I mean, this guy's, like, 280 pounds, like, sea captain.
John: All of his staff, I'm talking about, like, hundreds of sailors...
John: When he walks by, they all cower.
John: I mean, not because I'm sure not because he's mean, but because it's the law of the sea, right?
John: He's the captain.
John: That's a pretty big deal on a boat.
John: You don't step onto the bridge unless you've, you know, unless you've like.
Merlin: That's his boat.
Merlin: It's his boat.
Merlin: That's how that's how captaining works.
Merlin: It's a it's a pretty big deal, I think.
John: Yeah, there's a button in some of the public bathrooms that says, you know, in the event of an emergency, push this button.
John: But don't push this button frivolously because it rings on the bridge.
What?
John: We will come rescue you, and we will come rescue you hard.
Merlin: As a former productivity expert, I have to tell you, that is a categorically terrible idea.
Merlin: Well, it's not like the captain's going to come.
Merlin: Just a moment, just a moment.
Merlin: Someone in the bathroom is having a problem.
John: They claim it's an emergency.
John: But it's like – it's their way of saying like if you're having an emergency, it had better fucking be an emergency because we're going to send sailors here.
John: But so anyway, we're walking around the bridge and people are – there's a very small group of us and people are asking him polite questions like what does this knob do and what's the –
John: you know what are what's this knob do like nobody's got nobody knows what to say to a sea captain and so so I said what's the weirdest thing you've ever seen you come out of the sea and he says I saw a sunfish which is an enormous fish a perfectly round fish that floats on the top of the floats on the surface of the sea and
John: And they're very rare.
John: Nobody ever sees them.
Merlin: Wow.
John: I saw one and I didn't know what it was.
Merlin: This is not a cryptozoological thing.
Merlin: This has been legitimated by schools and stuff.
John: So he has seen one.
John: And this is a guy who spent 50 years on the sea or whatever.
John: He says, I've seen a sunfish and I didn't know what it was.
John: It freaked me out because it's enormous, right?
John: It's the size of a trampoline or something.
John: Right.
John: And then he said, I saw a second one and I knew what it was by that point.
John: And I marveled at it.
John: So I was like, okay, weird creature of the deep.
John: And then I said, in all these years of staring out at the sea, have you ever seen any UFOs?
John: Just like that without any kind of like... I was just like, all right, sci-fi Star Trek captain, let's get down to the nitty gritty.
John: You are standing on this bridge staring out at the open sea for years at a time.
John: Let's hear your UFO shit.
John: And at that moment, all of his crew, like all of the junior officers or whatever, they all stare at their shoes.
John: And I was like, oh.
John: And the captain says, I've seen...
John: Lights over the Bahamas.
John: That behaved unlike a ship or a plane.
John: Unexplained lights over the Bahamas.
Merlin: When you're coming up in whatever the Navy is in Canada, you must have so many hours you spend visually identifying what something is or what something could be.
Merlin: You must get really good at that over time.
Merlin: It's all you do.
Merlin: You would know.
Merlin: It would be like all day long you're inspecting hot dogs and suddenly there's a poodle there and you go, I definitely know that this does not belong here.
John: Yeah, these guys are standing with this 200 degree view looking out onto a perfectly flat ocean.
John: and you can see to the horizon in every direction, and that's all they do.
John: They just sit there and stare out, and every once in a while they raise some binoculars to their eyes, and they look out and see, I don't know what, flotsam, jetsam?
John: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
John: And so when a sea captain tells me unexplained lights over the Bahamas, and he says, unlike a ship or a plane, so that implies that they're kind of down in the ship area, but they're not acting like a ship.
John: I was like, okay, sea captain.
John: That's a good story.
John: And then I said, did you ever see a rogue wave?
John: And he said, I've talked to captains that have encountered rogue waves, but I've never seen one.
John: So that was interesting.
John: That's a wave out of nowhere that's improbably high?
John: Massive wave out of nowhere, where you're just sitting on a calm sea, and then all of a sudden, whoa, super wave.
John: And then the last question I said was, what's the tallest sea you ever saw?
John: And he said, I was captaining a freighter,
John: I was captain in a freighter out of Newfoundland.
John: I love this story already.
John: And he said, I was south of Greenland during the perfect storm.
John: The famous one from the movie.
John: The famous perfect storm.
John: And he said, the bridge on that ship was 50 feet off the sea.
John: And he said, I had to lean forward and look up out the window to see the crests of the waves.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And I was like, that's a good story, sea captain.
John: I'm really warming up to you.
John: I want to sit here on the bridge and ask you more and more questions.
John: But then they shuffled us away.
John: They shuffled the rest of us away, but Wil Wheaton stayed behind to talk about.
John: I stayed in the door to watch their exchange.
John: And the captain was like, what was it like to be in stand by me?
John: I mean, he was just a super fan.
John: I love that.
John: And Will was like, well, you know, it's been 30 years since Stand By Me, and they both marveled at that.
Merlin: Will says he's a gracious guy, though.
Merlin: He handles a situation like that well.
John: He is amazing at that.
Merlin: He's a good fellow.
John: Yeah.
John: So anyway, that was very interesting.
John: And you know what?
John: We were in the Bermuda Triangle while we were having this conversation.
John: Well, that's not smart.
John: We were sailing through the Bermuda Triangle while I conjured up alien stories from the sea captain.
John: And I swear all of his staff got really uncomfortable when we started talking about UFOs.
Merlin: Why do you think that is?
John: I don't know.
John: Maybe the sea captain isn't supposed to be
John: He's not supposed to let there be anything that he doesn't control?
Merlin: I can think of a lot of, or at least a handful of reasons.
Merlin: I mean, the first reason, if this was a movie, was that it was something everybody saw and agreed with.
Merlin: And it was a known thing that everybody, lots of people had seen.
Merlin: And you don't talk about it because of Omerta.
Merlin: Then the other one would be, we're pretty sure he didn't really see that, and he keeps talking about it a lot.
Merlin: And that's the kind of thing where somebody calls the Delaware boats to, you know what I'm saying?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Well, I didn't get the sense that they were uncomfortable, like, here he goes again.
John: It was a night just like this.
John: But I do feel like there might be some omerta of the sea.
John: Like, first rule of sea captaining is don't talk about sea captaining.
John: where you're like, yeah, there are fucking aliens living under the ocean.
John: It would be hard to train if that were actually the rules of Sea Captain and Club.
John: No, you just walk around behind another Sea Captain and he tells you nothing.
John: You follow him for long enough until you get the swagger.
Merlin: You realize that he was you the whole time.
Merlin: The call's coming from inside the captain.
Merlin: Welcome back.
Merlin: Did you get to go to that weird island on Haiti where the person got lost?
Merlin: Did you get to go to that?
John: We didn't go to Haiti this time.
John: It was very little.
John: I stayed off of St.
John: Thomas because I had a bad experience the last time I went to St.
John: Thomas.
John: There was nothing terrible about it.
John: I just had an unenjoyable time.
Mm-hmm.
John: But I did go to St.
John: Martin, which I like a lot.
John: And I had a very nice time in St.
John: Martin, although my daughter barfed.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: You brought your family?
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: The whole gang.
Merlin: I thought part of your emerita of the sea is you were never bringing your family again.
John: Well, you know, I have my room, which is provided for me by the Joko crews.
John: They're down in steerage.
Merlin: Where I ensconce myself.
John: And then they all have cabins, right?
John: Normal cabins for normal people on normal floor.
Merlin: Did you bring the entire complement of women in your life?
John: I did.
John: I got every woman I could think of.
John: All three of them.
John: Let's see.
John: There were one, two, three, four, five.
John: Whoa.
John: Five family ladies.
John: I didn't bring every woman I could think of.
John: That would be a hell of a weird cruise.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: That's the stuff of nightmares.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It's a bespoke cruise where every single person on there is a woman that you've wronged.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, depending if there was a code of conduct.
John: that everybody had to agree to before we got on the boat, maybe it could be a fun cruise.
John: But I get the feeling, knowing the people that I've known, they would all agree to the code of conduct with no intention of upholding it.
Merlin: Absolutely not.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But I mean, can you imagine the kind of breakout receptions that they're having?
Merlin: It could be regional.
Merlin: It could be from a certain time.
Merlin: It could be from a certain industry.
Merlin: There might just be people that worked at Barsouk, and they would have a meeting over here.
Merlin: You know, on the Alito deck, on the Alito deck.
John: Sure, or the ones that would bump into each other on the deck and go, oh, my God, you look exactly like me.
John: What does that say?
John: Oh, my God.
John: You'd be like, no, no, no, no, no.
John: Totally coincidence.
John: They have the Doc Martin breakout room.
John: Ugh, everybody.
John: Playing games in the basement.
John: And they look and they all have Roadrunner tattoos.
John: Ha, ha, ha.
John: What?
Merlin: He made you give one, too.
Merlin: Oh, God, that would be so awful.
John: So, yeah, that was fun.
John: And, you know, and the family, the family, there were enough family members that they could entertain themselves.
John: And my daughter was old enough to go to the...
John: What she called the, it was the preschool, right?
John: They have a daycare preschool fun place for kids, which she mispronounced as the Aquanuts.
John: She was like, I'm an Aquanut.
John: Take me to the Aquanuts.
John: And I was like, Aquanuts.
John: That's cute.
John: Is exactly right.
John: And that's when our podcast turned into Cute Things That Kids Say.
John: What about the soft serve machine?
John: Did she ever discover that?
John: She knew all about it.
John: She knew about it long before we got on the boat.
John: That was a destination for us.
John: It was for me last year.
John: You just walk up to it and get soft serve anytime you feel like it.
John: But I only went there once this time.
John: I never went to Johnny Rockets a single time.
John: What?
John: I basically just sat on my balcony and calculated trajectories for 12-pound cannonballs for everything that we passed.
John: I was like, could I hit that with a 12-pound cannonball?
John: Could I hit that with a 12-pound cannonball?
John: I spent a lot of time doing that.
John: But, yeah, it was – you know, next year – I don't want to turn this into an advertisement, an unpaid advertisement, I might add, for the Joko Cruise.
John: But next year –
John: We're taking over an entire boat and leaving from San Diego.
John: And so it's going to be bananas.
John: It's already bananas.
John: It's actually a really good idea.
John: It's going to be totally crazy.
John: And we have discussed at length different stratagems
John: to prohibit sea monkeys from turning it into a clothing optional cruise.
John: Because I know there are at least 150 of them that would take off all their clothes the moment they got on the boat.
John: You think so?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Well, it's part of the sex positivity of the overarching doctrine of nerdism, which says, hey, what's the matter?
John: Don't body shame me.
John: I want to be naked right now.
John: Would they still wear shoes?
John: flip-flops the worst shoe of all uh and so i i so i absolutely as soon as it was as soon as we even started talking two years ago about taking over a whole boat i was like fucking nerd sex crews watch out and so then we started all talking about it like what are we gonna do like is if this just turns into a total pig pile right like a like a sex pyramid
John: Um, I like, how is that going to go over there?
John: Kids on the boat.
John: I'm not sure that I want to go.
John: I mean, like there's a game room, but what if there was, what if everybody was naked in the game room?
John: Sticking 20 sided die up one another.
John: Yeah.
John: No.
John: Uh, but I think we've got, I think we have, we've covered that now.
John: We've discussed it sort of somewhat openly with everybody and said like, Oh, it's a family cruise.
John: You can be naked in your room, but you always could have done that.
Merlin: Is it a family cruise?
Um,
John: I bring my family, as previously noted.
Merlin: I'm not sure that makes it a family cruise.
Merlin: It depends on what you call family.
Merlin: Family, that's a terrible word that gets used to mean too many different things by terrible people.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But you could bring kids on that.
Merlin: I don't know if it's the best thing.
Merlin: But, you know, it's interesting because what that cruise seems to have become over the years is very much its own thing to where it seems like – and I just want to also credit the folks who run it –
Merlin: You know, especially what Paul goes through with the work that he does on that.
Merlin: I mean, I know he's not the only one.
Merlin: There's a whole staff.
Merlin: But I mean, like, my God, just the huge amount of work to make everybody as happy as they can be made is staggering.
Merlin: But it really seems like it's become something.
Merlin: How do I put this in a nice way?
Merlin: It's definitely still the Joko Cruz, right?
Merlin: But it's kind of it's really about the folks who go on it now.
Merlin: And Jonathan doesn't really need to be there for it to be the Joko Cruz.
John: I've been saying for a few years now that the final iteration of this, the final form, if you will, of the Joko Cruz will be where Jonathan has become a Colonel Sanders.
John: Where he has gone into the illustration of himself.
John: I get it.
John: He's just a hologram.
Merlin: But you could hire any competent professional actor, singer to be Jonathan.
Merlin: It could just be a guy who comes around and seems pretty nervous and you're not sure why.
John: Yeah.
John: Do you remember in the late 70s, early 80s when Ronald McDonald suddenly was a woman or looked like a woman?
Merlin: I've seen the hot Japanese version, hot female Japanese version of Ronald McDonald.
Merlin: I don't remember.
Merlin: Is it like Mr. Noodle where suddenly it was Kristen Chenoweth?
Yeah.
John: I'm not sure I get that reference.
Merlin: You didn't do Sesame Street, huh?
John: Well, of course I did Sesame Street.
John: Who's Mr. Noodle?
John: Oh, for the love of Christ.
Merlin: This is late period.
Merlin: It's inside.
Merlin: I mean, with your child, John, inside of Elmo's World, there's a segment where I think it was initially that nice guy from Evening Shade who passed a few years ago, and then it was Bill Irwin.
Merlin: I forget who came first.
Merlin: Bill Irwin, the wonderful, talented actor and mime guy.
Merlin: And then at some point they brought in Miss Noodle,
Merlin: or Ms.
Merlin: Noodle, which is Kristen Chenoweth, the wonderful actress and singer.
Merlin: Mr. Noodle has problems.
Merlin: He's having problems.
John: You never saw Mr. Noodle?
John: You are shooting word confetti out of a cannon at me right now.
John: I have no idea what any of those words mean.
John: I recognize them as English words.
John: Really?
John: Before my daughter was born, I had one exposure to Elmo.
John: And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
John: Well, he's pretty cute.
John: Well, but I'm basing all this on one exposure, right?
John: Little kids.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I have great memories.
Merlin: We were not a giant Elmo house.
Merlin: Oh, can I tell you a cute story?
Merlin: You've seen Elmo on the show, right?
Merlin: I know what an Elmo is.
Merlin: And he basically, at the end, he sings a song about whatever the topic was, and he always sings it to the tune of Jingle Bells.
Merlin: So he goes, jacket, jacket, jacket, jacket, jacket, jacket.
Merlin: Or like, you know, whatever.
Merlin: Shoebox, shoebox, shoebox, whatever it is.
Merlin: He sings this little song.
Merlin: I do not find this cute.
Merlin: Oh, I haven't gotten to the cute part yet.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: You don't get it now.
John: Okay, go ahead.
Merlin: Okay, you know, before my daughter— He pulls down his pants and he has a little furry penis?
Merlin: No, not that I've seen.
Merlin: I haven't seen that episode.
Merlin: That might be one of the lost episodes.
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Now, you don't deserve this sweet story.
Merlin: But because we'd seen so many Elmos, and he always sang the Jingle Bell song, when my daughter saw something red, she would point to it and say, ha, ha, ha.
Merlin: And that's how my daughter said red.
Merlin: She said, ha, ha, ha, to the tune of Jingle Bells.
Merlin: It was really cute.
Merlin: Also, another cute one, to describe something as little, she would go, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Merlin: How cute is that?
John: That is cute.
John: Want to hear what big was?
John: Okay, what's big?
John: What was big?
John: Oh, sure, that is big.
John: Kids are awesome.
John: So, Mr. Noodle, we're going to... I have kept Elmo as I have kept Dora.
John: Oh, you chose correctly there, my friend.
John: Yeah, well, but Elmo too.
John: I lump Elmo and Dora together into a category of thing that I never let pass the threshold.
John: And so I have no idea what a Mr. Noodle is.
John: I do not know the name of Nora's little monkey friend or Dora.
John: or whatever, and their little whiny voices and their massively pedantic version of how to communicate with kids.
John: That's excruciating.
John: I do not have it in.
John: And now, I came downstairs this morning.
John: Oh, my God.
John: We're turning into a fucking dad podcast.
John: Our dad jokes.
John: have been getting worse and worse.
John: So at least mine have, but now we're talking about our kids at length.
John: But I came downstairs this morning and she was sitting at the table all by herself, reading aloud from her Dick and Jane book.
John: Oh, and I, I bought the Dick and Jane book and said, listen, because there's all these like how to teach your kids to read app or whatever.
John: Um,
John: And I said, I learned to read with Dick and Jane as my mother and father before me, and she will learn to read from Dick and Jane.
John: That's nice.
John: Keep it modern.
John: Dick sees spot.
John: Spot runs.
John: Go, spot, go.
John: Oh, oh, oh.
John: Spot.
John: Spot!
Merlin: That's amazing.
Merlin: You haven't read it in years and you still remember so much of the... That's the setup for the story.
John: Because I heard it this morning.
John: I came downstairs and she's sitting there all by herself at the table reading aloud from Dick and Jane.
John: And I was like, there it is.
John: There it is.
John: All in a nutshell.
John: She'll be fine now.
John: She doesn't need anything else.
John: We've set her on the right path.
John: She's already been told what to read.
Merlin: She's ready to go now.
John: Dick and Jane sees spot.
John: Isn't that a nice feeling, though?
John: I mean, the whole reading thing is a nice feeling.
John: That's very nice.
John: So she recognizes what a Dora is.
John: She knows what an Elmo is, too.
John: She has seen them.
John: She's seen them in the wild, right?
John: You're walking through a Target because Daddy needs a spatula.
John: And she goes, what, you don't get your spatulas at Target?
John: You said, hmm, that's not where you get spatulas.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: I'd love to talk about Target.
Merlin: I love going to Target.
Merlin: Do you call it Target?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I haven't called it Target since 1992.
Merlin: Ha, ha, ha.
Merlin: That was funny for like an hour.
Merlin: It's like your friend's mom who always says, thank you.
Merlin: Like, stop doing that.
Merlin: That's not funny anymore.
John: Whose friend's mom says thank you?
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: What does that mean?
Merlin: Oh, it's a line where somebody says, oh, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't really like Kim Kardashian that much.
Merlin: And she goes, thank you.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: An affirmative.
John: Thank you.
John: Right.
John: I think we've talked about this before, but...
John: Do you remember in the mid-80s when all of a sudden everybody was saying, yeah, it is?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Have we discussed this?
Merlin: I still have a lot of these ticks I haven't gotten rid of, and I don't want to delve into it too far because I still have a lot of terrible ticks that I'm not proud of.
Merlin: You... Like the sniffing?
Merlin: Like always sniffing?
Merlin: Not always sniffing.
Merlin: You're always sniffing.
Merlin: You're always sniffing.
Merlin: You've done 190 episodes of this show and you still don't clear your throat before you pick up the phone.
Merlin: What would that even entail?
Merlin: You're talking about like before you pick up the phone.
Merlin: I honestly don't want to think about it too much.
Merlin: I don't know what it would entail.
Merlin: I love Target.
Merlin: We went the other day and we got so much good stuff.
Merlin: I can't even tell you how much great stuff we got at Target.
John: Have you noticed at Target that all the boy clothes and the girl clothes are completely sequestered from one another?
John: You do not want to fucking get me started on this.
John: The boy clothes all have cool cars and rocket ships and skulls and crossbones, and the girl clothes are just like, ugh.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: We walk right past.
Merlin: There's no point.
Merlin: And here's the other thing.
Merlin: Like, I went to get, actually, I was going to get my kid.
Merlin: So my kid leaves things on the playground.
Merlin: She forgets her jackets.
Merlin: She forgets, jacket, jacket, jacket.
Merlin: She forgets her jacket.
Merlin: She forgets her water bottles.
Merlin: We're constantly – we're working on this, right?
Merlin: She's great otherwise.
Merlin: But so I'm getting her more like cheap jackets.
John: Oh, good strategy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean not cheap.
Merlin: I mean but inexpensive because I figure I'm not going to give her an heirloom jacket.
Yeah.
Merlin: And so you walk into the girls section.
Merlin: It's like everything's pink.
Merlin: And you walk in there.
Merlin: It's all shit.
Merlin: It's all you know what?
Merlin: They have cool belts.
Merlin: They have cool belts that are fun.
Merlin: They have they have some cool underwear.
Merlin: But then if you want anything decent, you have to go to the boys area because they just assume that every girl is going to dress like some somebody who falls down a well and waits to be rescued.
Merlin: It's so goddamn annoying.
Merlin: And so I go to Amazon and I say, okay, I want to get her a new hoodie.
Merlin: I want to get her a Minecraft hoodie.
Merlin: I want to get her a hoodie from the cat game.
Merlin: I want to get her a Pusheen hoodie.
Merlin: I go in, I do a search.
Merlin: You know what you see under clothes?
Merlin: You see men's clothes, you see women's clothes and you see boys clothes.
Merlin: Unless you search for something really insipid and fucking pink.
Merlin: And then you get tee tee tee down here.
Merlin: There's girls clothes.
Merlin: It's got a ruffle and it's purple.
Merlin: Beep, boop, boop.
Merlin: My kid does not dress, I mean, when she dresses, like the other day, like to go to Target, she wears like horizontal striped leggings with a frilly, ridiculously frilly, looks like a loofah skirt and a Captain America shirt and then a headband with ears.
Merlin: That's how my daughter dresses.
Merlin: She wears whatever the fuck she feels like and it's unerringly hilarious.
Merlin: What she rarely does is go, I want to look like somebody from Frozen.
Merlin: It's just, it's so, and I'm not even against Frozen.
Merlin: It's just that I'm so tired of that.
Merlin: Anyway, sorry.
Merlin: That's a dumb dad of a daughter thing that you won't appreciate until you're there.
Merlin: Let alone go to Target to try to find a Rey character.
Merlin: Oh, you can buy a whole big pack of Star Wars boys.
Merlin: You can get three different fucking stormtroopers and there's no Rey.
John: Well, that seemed like truly a cultural moment when it was like, oh, we didn't want to put Rey characters out there because we didn't want to spoil the surprise.
Merlin: It'll spoil the movie that the star of the movie is in the set.
Merlin: No, there's honestly a hilarious set of Force Awakens, probably 12-inch size characters, and it's got Finn, it's got Poe, it's got Han Solo's son, it's got a stormtrooper, and it's got another stormtrooper.
John: Right.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, but there's no ray in there.
Merlin: You know, I had an interesting insight.
Merlin: Two anonymous stormtroopers and no ray.
John: Leaving that aside, which is incredible, Rey is one of my favorite characters in contemporary cinema, and I can't wait to see what happens.
Merlin: She perfectly embodies what that movie needed to be, and it would not have been the same movie without her.
Merlin: She's the fan on the screen, and it was perfect.
John: But I had an interesting insight into the film.
John: You know, I hesitated to criticize the Star Wars movie at all,
John: Because, you know, as much as I like getting letters.
Merlin: There's a lot of good reasons to not do that.
John: Yeah, as much as I like getting letters, I did not want to get any letters about this.
John: But this was one of those things as I was walking along and all of a sudden like an acorn fell on my head.
John: And I said, wait a minute.
John: Why didn't they do it that way?
John: You know that feeling?
John: When you're like, why didn't they do it that way?
Merlin: I feel that way about lots of things.
Merlin: What was it in this case?
John: Well, in this case, the Han Solo son.
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Yeah, not a fan.
John: Whose name is Paco Rabanne or whatever.
John: Alonzo.
Merlin: It's funnier if I don't laugh, but that's so perfect.
Merlin: Yeah, Alonzo Morningstar.
Merlin: His name is Rilo Kiley.
John: Yeah, Friedrich von Schusenstrasse.
John: Right.
John: His first appearance in the film is in his guise, right?
John: His guise.
John: It's a terrible error.
John: Terrible error.
John: As Darth Worf or Wardy Worf, Mark, or whatever.
John: And you see him and he appears and you're like, oh, here's the new bad guy.
John: And then as the film progresses, you see that he is not really in his full...
John: He's not fully in his powers.
John: He's not his full Pokemon yet.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Like when Darth Vader and the generals, the high-ranking soldiers have encounters, you see that they are terrified of him.
Merlin: Even though what was so effective in those movies is you understand that Darth Vader has a boss, but it's still Darth Vader that everybody's scared of.
Merlin: Everybody's scared of Darth, and you're not sure what his rank is.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He kind of feels like, not a rogue, but he's almost like a consultant.
Merlin: Like, he's been brought in to make sure you rebuild this fucking Death Star.
Merlin: And this needs to happen.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: I mean, and... Pray I do not alter it further.
John: In a way that he is like, he's a mini-emperor, right?
John: But in the new Star Wars movie, the Paco Rabanne character does not have very much authority, right?
John: The general is openly contemptuous of him.
John: And he doesn't really have a very good retort, but he's in this amazing gas mask costume.
John: Yeah, I like this voice.
John: I thought that was cool.
John: But then as the film unfolds,
John: the mask comes off and you see that he's just sort of a callow male model.
John: It's not, I mean, it was very clear why Darth Vader wore the mask because he was hideously disfigured.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, even before you learned all the, you know, retcon details of it, like you could tell that he was, he was, he was messed up in a number of ways.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: He needed that to live.
John: Probably the mask was breathing for him and the storm troopers wore masks because it wasn't clear whether or not they were robots.
John: At first.
John: Yeah, totally.
John: Right.
John: For the longest time, we thought they were robots.
John: And then it turned out they were clones.
Merlin: I mean, they were basically they were they were like Nazis in a World War Two movie.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Just like like generic people to be shot.
John: But as the film unfolds, then the the Paco Rabanne character uses his mask less and less.
John: Until he just seems like a teenager running around, very petulant.
John: It's more like a bandana.
John: He just wears it when he feels like it.
John: And it's never explained what the purpose of it is, except that it's just an affectation.
John: It's just like a hat, except it covers his face.
John: Why didn't they start the movie with him without his mask?
John: And that's why nobody respects him yet.
John: He's walking around in a cape.
John: He's obviously a Jedi, but he's an inexperienced Jedi.
Merlin: Well, at the very least, he's force-sensitive.
Merlin: We don't know if he, maybe not.
Merlin: Jedi person.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I can't believe what I just did.
Merlin: I'm so sorry.
John: No, it's quite all right.
Merlin: I'm cutting that out.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I just actually knew about Star Wars.
John: There's a reason that he's there, and that's because he has force power, right?
John: But the generals are contemptuous of him because he can't quite lift them off the ground and make them choke yet.
John: Right.
John: So so he's it's some kind of thing where he is being groomed by the new emperor.
John: Right.
John: But he's still a kind of a callow teenager.
John: And that's why nobody takes him seriously.
John: And then over the course of the film.
John: He inherits the helmet because something.
John: I get it.
John: Right?
John: Why do it the reverse way where we're set up to think like, oh, this guy looks mean.
John: He's going to be mean.
John: And then over the course of time, we're already trying to, by the end of the first film, we're already in this mode of like, is he going to be, is he savable?
John: Is he going to be rescuable?
John: We didn't even set him up as like,
John: as like a guy whose bitterness turns him to the dark side increasingly, he's already like, oh, he doesn't know whether he's bad or not.
John: I just feel like, come on.
Merlin: Something a lot of people have said about a lot of things related to Star Wars that I happen to agree with, and we'll make this short because I just can't handle the email.
Merlin: But one of the great things about...
Merlin: Something Syracuse and I talked about in terms of how it's like Fury Road in some ways, the first Star Wars, very little is done to explain what everything means.
Merlin: There's so much just pure action and exposition just based on what you're looking at right now.
Merlin: Exposition is that there's these robots.
Merlin: Sorry, that's all we have time to explain because there's so much story to get through here.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: And there's all kinds of things that people spent years wondering about and so forth, but what you're describing here, we didn't understand...
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: But, like, you know, the less we knew, the more interesting he was.
John: Well, and maybe – I mean, do you remember feeling like Darth Vader might have been a robot, a magic robot?
John: Absolutely.
Merlin: Especially on the first viewing.
Merlin: Like, it seemed – yeah, I always assumed the stormtroopers, just because of their movements, were whatever the galaxy faraway version of human was.
John: Oh, you knew that there were humans inside the stormtrooper?
Merlin: Well, they didn't move like robots.
Merlin: If they wanted to telegraph that they were robots, it seems they would have handled that differently.
John: So Cylons were post-first Star Wars.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Because Cylons were clearly robots.
Merlin: Cylons were clearly, let's say, at a ripoff of Stormtroopers, but who were definitely robots.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And I think that I was coming at it from more of a, like, Stormtroopers were proto-Cylons.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Because, again, what do they need the masks for?
John: Masks are uncomfortable.
John: Yeah.
John: And it's never specified, like, do the masks let them see Terminator style?
John: Are the eyepieces giving them additional information?
John: We didn't know.
John: We didn't know.
John: Does it let them breathe on foreign planets where there isn't oxygen?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No idea.
Merlin: No idea.
Merlin: I love Target.
Merlin: What did we end up getting?
Merlin: We got a lot of good stuff.
Merlin: We got some great clothes.
Merlin: We did something we don't usually do, which is we got her some branded franchise clothing for a property that's not even out yet.
Merlin: But I can already tell we're going to like it.
Merlin: Do you want to know what just happened to me?
John: No.
John: Well, I was walking across the room and I accidentally unplugged my headphones.
John: Oh, okay.
John: And when I came back, you had completely changed the topic.
John: Oh, dear, yeah.
John: So fast, it almost never happens like that.
John: And I didn't hear the transition, right?
John: So I was like coming back in, plugging my headphones back in.
Merlin: I said Zootopia.
John: Yeah.
John: And you were just like, anyway, just as if we had been talking about your daughter's clothes the entire time.
Merlin: I love Target.
Merlin: We got all kinds of stuff there.
Merlin: We didn't get a spatula.
Merlin: We got a lot of good stuff.
Merlin: What do we get?
Merlin: What do we do?
Merlin: We got some clothes for her.
Merlin: We got, oh, we got her a little terrarium.
Merlin: You know what's nice to get at Target?
Merlin: What's that?
John: Do you have sensitive skin?
Merlin: Well, I mean, it's, you know, it doesn't like getting his feelings hurt like anybody.
John: Right.
John: But I mean, you're... It's not touchy, but... You're essentially a Northern European.
Yeah.
Merlin: I know, I don't want to say too much here, but I know that you have suffered in silence.
Merlin: I know, for example, that your head sometimes is allergic to itself.
John: My head and face are both allergic to themselves.
John: And I cannot abide any kind of real perfume.
John: And I cannot use normal soap.
John: If I wash my clothes in typical normal laundry detergent, I will get an enormous complete body heat rash that sometimes swells my skin up so that it is like an inch puffier than it normally is.
John: Oh, that's miserable.
John: It is awful.
John: It's terrible.
John: If somebody else washes my clothes, I basically have to wash them again.
John: Um, because if I put them on, I will get, I mean, everywhere the clothes touch my skin, I will get this awful heat rash that, that is like swollen and burns and doesn't go away.
John: I have to lay naked on a, on a cool sheet and fan myself with a magazine.
Merlin: And it is any particular kind of magazine.
Um,
John: Like a dwell?
John: No, I don't get dwell anymore.
John: I felt burned by dwell.
John: I got it for a while and I was like, dwell, this is going to be... Things with horizontal slats are going to get big pretty soon.
John: Yeah, I'm going to live in a shipping container.
John: Hooray for me!
Merlin: Barefoot children, play under the stairs.
Merlin: Beep boop.
John: After a while I realized that it was...
John: They were just taking pictures of the same house from different angles.
John: That took me two years to figure that out.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That glass door looks familiar.
Merlin: That's a really nice deck.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Why is that?
Merlin: That child has the same toys.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: This house has a garage door, too.
John: The child has the same three toys as every child in these.
John: No, thank you.
John: There was absolutely no aesthetic variation after like 500 pictures.
John: This is where Connor keeps his ball.
John: Yeah.
John: This is kind of a little nook, a reading nook.
John: It's a reading nook that's shaped like the inside of a parachute.
Merlin: This is our crying bidet.
Merlin: And over here we have our mud palace.
Merlin: And those aren't real things.
Merlin: She's a documentary filmmaker and he's kind of a videographer.
Merlin: He used to make apps.
Merlin: Now he's working on something he can't talk about.
Merlin: He can't talk about it.
Merlin: And Tyler loves his little ball.
John: But here's what I get at Target, which is cheer free.
Merlin: Cheer free.
John: Cheer is a laundry detergent.
John: Cheer free.
John: But cheer free has no chemicals.
John: It has no stuff in it.
John: It has chemicals.
John: I don't know what they are.
John: I think Cheer Free is just, I think a couple of guys go over a barbed wire fence to the dumpster outside of a liposuction facility.
John: Oh, nice.
John: And they get some bags of human fat and then they render it with lye.
John: And that is what Cheer Free is.
John: So it doesn't, your clothes don't smell like any kind of perfume.
John: Cheer Free, get some skin in the game.
John: Yeah, well, yeah.
John: It doesn't make my body attack itself.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: And introduces like some kind of, what do you call it, an antibody?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: This might be a homeopathy, John.
Merlin: You might be doing homeopathy.
Merlin: It might be.
Merlin: It might take a little bit of human skin to make your skin not be bothered.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: But it's at such a micro dose that it literally can't do anything useful.
John: Maybe it's micro dosing me with LSD and I just don't realize that my skin is wrong.
Merlin: Oh, maybe you're in Dick Cheney's bunker.
John: Even Fred Durst is just sparking a doobie alarm.
John: No, no, no.
John: Ever since we mentioned that the last time, I have had more Fred Durst mentions in my mentions than I ever wanted.
John: And I don't want to think about him.
John: I do not want to think about him.
Merlin: We never know what's going to endure when we say it.
Merlin: We might say something wrong, like something that's not even correct.
Merlin: We might say something ironically, like as a jokey joke.
Merlin: And that becomes what people remember.
Merlin: It's a lot of responsibility.
John: It is a lot of responsibility to have such, well, to be fucking headphony, award-winning podcasters.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: So this keeps you, so you've had good experience with this and you can buy a big bottle of it at Target.
John: Get it at Target, yeah.
John: I went to the dermatologist, right?
John: I've told you this story.
John: And the dermatologist said, I don't know what your problem is.
John: You're allergic to yourself.
John: And I said, that's a terrible thing to say to somebody, that they're allergic to themselves.
Merlin: That's what you say right before you send someone to the fucking Mayo Clinic.
Merlin: You don't just trot somebody out of their office with stuff like that.
John: Yeah, I don't want to be a boy in the bubble.
John: And he was like, no, you're just allergic to your skin oil.
John: And I was like, my skin oil?
John: He was like, yeah, you can't, you know, you have to just, you can't just let it sit on your skin because it will just, your body will go after it.
Merlin: And I was like, oh, come on.
John: Checks out.
John: Story checks out.
John: Come on.
John: Give me something, you know, give me something to ride on, man.
Merlin: So, yeah.
John: So I go to Target for that and spatulas.
Merlin: That's good.
Merlin: And spatulas.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What else did we get?
Merlin: We were going to get bowls.
Merlin: I didn't like the bowls.
Merlin: Nope.
Merlin: Don't like their bowls.
Merlin: There's a lot of things we didn't buy there, but we ended up spending like $400, though.
Merlin: We got a lot of stuff.
John: I go up and down the aisles.
John: Did you know this about me, that when I go into a store, I have to go up and down every aisle?
Merlin: Every time?
John: It's not OCD-ish.
John: No, certainly not.
John: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: Just you're organized.
John: You got a way you like to do things.
John: I want to walk down every aisle and see what's there.
John: How are you going to live with yourself if you go out of the store?
John: You didn't walk down the one aisle that had something.
John: So when I go to Costco, whenever I go to Costco with anyone who knows me, they're like, please don't go up and down every aisle.
John: We're just here for the 75-pound bag of peanut brittle.
Merlin: Well, especially accounting for how tall their shelves are.
Merlin: It's one thing to just look at eye level, but if you look at everything on the shelves at Costco and account for the people who are getting the free samples, that's going to be a long day, my friend.
John: Well, it is.
John: It's always a long day.
John: You go in there and you're like, do I need 47 Sharpies?
John: you gotta think about it think about it no do i need how much do we really need in life well it's true but every every once in a while i what was the last thing i went in there i thought i needed
John: It was some kind of like, oh, it was maybe one of those ladders that folds into a scaffold that folds into like an origami ladder.
Merlin: Origami ladder I've seen on TV.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Those are neat.
John: I was like, maybe I need that.
John: Or maybe I need one of those juicers that goes at 5,000 RPM that'll turn bricks into a juice.
John: But it ends up I get the same thing.
John: I get spaghetti sauce and I get peanut brittle and then I'm out of there.
John: But I still have to go down every aisle.
John: You don't have to, but I mean, right?
John: You feel like you have to.
John: If I go in and somebody's like, you are forbidden from going up and down every aisle.
John: I can hang with that.
John: If I'm expressly forbidden, I can go, all right, all right.
Merlin: But you'll do seafood and automotive and drinks and deli.
John: Yep.
Merlin: Garden supplies.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Furniture.
Merlin: For sure.
Merlin: Oh, definitely office supplies and safes, right?
Merlin: Well, yeah, but socks and bedding.
Merlin: Oh, you go through the middle.
Merlin: You go through that big middle part.
Merlin: I like the middle part.
Merlin: You know, Costco has a lot of, like, for your staple-type clothes, they've got pretty good socks.
Merlin: They've got pretty good undershirts.
John: All my underwear was from Costco until very recently when I started getting underwear from this fancy place.
Merlin: Oh, I get internet underwear.
Merlin: But there's also the, I heard the workout clothes there.
Merlin: I know how you love to work out.
Merlin: They have lots of good workout clothes.
Merlin: They probably have BMW pants you can get there.
John: Let me tell you about the underwear I'm wearing right now.
John: Thank you.
John: It is lined, or not lined, it's knitted with microfibers of silver.
Merlin: So people can steal your identity?
John: No, no, no.
John: Silver is antibacterial or anti, like silver scares all the, the, the, the, the, what?
John: The living.
John: Oh, the biome.
John: The biomes.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: It scares the biomes, and they get out of your underwear.
John: So the underwear is like... You sure it's silver?
John: I don't want to say it's impregnated with silver.
John: No, that's old thinking.
John: But silver is... It's shot through with silver.
John: There you go.
John: It's shot through with silver, and it feels just like normal underwear.
John: But it creates... It's your little secret.
John: It creates an inhospitable environment.
John: for all the things that might get in your underwear.
John: I don't know how they get in there.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And this also, I mean, let's be honest, you've got things like issues of contagion and odor, but also you keep your junk from becoming allergic to itself, but with the silver.
John: I'm waiting to see if that's true.
John: But it feels like it's an extra layer of protection, and it's a little secret, like I'm wearing silver underwear.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And they're very comfortable.
John: And maybe they protect my nether regions from harmful rays.
John: Are you worried about that?
Merlin: Am I worried about that?
Merlin: Harmful rays?
Merlin: I think about that.
Merlin: I think about that.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm very interested.
Merlin: What can I say about this?
John: The bad guys in Star Trek are worried about harmful rays.
Merlin: Get it?
Merlin: Harmful rays.
Merlin: Oh, John.
Merlin: Dad joke.
Merlin: That's awfully good.
Merlin: Oh, thanks.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
John: Thanks.
Merlin: Now everyone will be laughing at that.
Merlin: Lay a wreath on that joke.
Merlin: Solo.
Merlin: Mos Eisley deaf.
Merlin: More like Millennial Falcon.
Merlin: Millennial Falcon.
John: I knew that if I unleashed the demon in you, that they would just come pouring out like a burst water balloon.
Merlin: I'd become more powerful than you can imagine.
Merlin: So, you know, I don't know what to say exactly about this, but I'm... What's happening?
Merlin: Well, I'm acquainted with someone who's had and having problems with things like worrying about rays.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: And I'm trying to learn more about it than just ha-ha chemtrails.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And it's super tough and super interesting for sure.
Merlin: There are a lot of rays.
Yeah.
Merlin: Well, but it's also like I'm trying to like I can.
Merlin: So that's enough said about that, except to say that it is very interesting and very complicated.
Merlin: And I actually I came across an interesting thing on the Reddit where somebody said, you know, you think about what people talk about, especially what has come to what some people have called paranoid schizophrenia, but some kind of like an effective thing.
Merlin: But, you know, you hear things like people saying they think they hear voices.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: They think the queen is talking to them.
Merlin: They hear voices on the radio addressing them.
Merlin: There are beams.
Merlin: You know, there are actually people who do line hats with aluminum foil because they don't want thoughts inserted or removed.
Merlin: All these things – the sad part of this is – the jokes that we make about this is that – the horrible truth is that there are people that, like, believe that more than anything they believe in the entire world.
Merlin: And it is really interesting.
Merlin: But there was – I just – I have a piece in – I haven't read the whole thing yet.
Merlin: But somebody was asking basically –
Merlin: With what we now call schizophrenia, with those particular symptoms, what did people imagine before the age of electricity?
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: There's so much thought now about there are rays that are doing this.
Merlin: There are ways of making you see certain images, insert and remove thoughts.
Merlin: But a lot of those in our age come down to electricity.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: What did people, if you like, hallucinate before we had electricity?
Merlin: Well, you know, there was spiritualism.
John: was a big thing, right?
Merlin: But part of the paranoid schizophrenia is this... I don't even know if that's exactly the correct term.
Merlin: Forgive me.
Merlin: I don't want to be... I'm really trying not to be insensitive about this because, you know, it's close to home.
Merlin: But it's interesting because a lot of it does involve... The paranoid part of the schizophrenia is that it's this very, very strong belief, essentially, that somebody's fucking with you.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that the complexity of the way your mind is working is because something is happening.
Merlin: Right.
John: Well, sure, but wouldn't that just be daemons?
John: Right.
John: I mean, before it was the man.
John: Oh, like you're bewitched or something.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, I don't think that there's anything specific to it being like other humans who are messing with you.
John: Except that in the modern age, that seems a lot more plausible than daemons.
John: Right.
John: Or people using, like, sorcery, right?
John: I guess sorcery would probably be the... Okay, yeah, yeah, that checks out.
Merlin: That checks out.
Merlin: And... Part of it also, then, is that... I think the part that makes this so interesting and scary is, like, part of it is that it involves somebody who has malicious...
Merlin: Like ill will for you and is acting upon it.
Merlin: A person or a group is acting upon this.
Merlin: You know, they are after you and they are organized.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that they're doing it remotely and that they're doing it through some means of obfuscation, which obfuscation is part of the very thing that is messing with you.
Right.
Merlin: So, I mean, like when you, I don't know, maybe I'm being precious about this, but it's super interesting when you break that down into parts.
Merlin: Can you imagine how excruciating that must be?
John: Well, it's awful.
Merlin: To like believe that more than you believe anything in the world.
John: But it's the core of the protocols of the elders of Zion.
John: I mean, people have always attributed that kind of malicious intent to the Jews or to, I mean, the Jews.
John: But, and that's, you know, that was a convenient, the Jews were a convenient scapegoat for all that kind of paranoia for everyone in Europe.
John: for years and years and years decades hundreds of years so and you still see you still see paranoics everywhere attributing all that mind control to the Bilderberg group or whatever yeah yeah I wonder how so would you put chemtrails in that in that pile in your reckoning I mean the reason that I feel chemtrails is so mockable is that it it's
John: it seems much more like one of those conspiracies that isn't founded in an actual mental illness, but is founded in the, you know, the pervasive American tendency that a tendency that the most ignorant people are the ones that are most certain about their beliefs.
John: So the people all across the country are absolutely sure that Obama is trying to take their guns or whatever the fuck their current thing is.
John: And chemtrails are just a part of that, which is like they're so profoundly ignorant of how things work and so supremely confident that their interpretation or the interpretation of the radio shock jock that they listen to.
Merlin: And you say this partly as somebody who's a little bit knowledgeable about aircraft.
Merlin: And how the sky works.
Merlin: And how governments work.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: Have you ever worked with governments?
John: You know, the motivation.
John: What would be required to have chemtrails be a project as big as they say and to keep it all a secret?
Yeah.
John: It's just hilarious.
John: And what is the benefit?
John: I mean, what would the benefit of mind control be?
John: There's so much mind control already that's just like right in – you're just holding it in your hand.
John: You're soaking in it, right?
John: But it's evident.
John: It's right in front of you.
John: There's no – nobody's trying to do it in secret and nobody's controlling it.
John: Like every attempt that they make to exert some sort of –
John: I mean, I do believe that it is plausible.
John: I believe that the narrative that the...
John: that there is some connection between drugs and guns and inner city violence that feels like it was seeded by, you know, seeded in some ways unintentionally.
John: The results were unintentional to the scale that they were.
John: But like the way that the CIA was drug running and paying for Nicaragua.
John: And giving black people AIDS.
John: Well, and the thing is, AIDS... Introducing crack.
Merlin: To supposedly directly deploy crack into ghettos.
Merlin: Because reasons.
John: I don't think they're clever enough...
John: I don't think anyone at the CIA is clever enough to orchestrate it, to orchestrate what happened.
John: But there's enough stuff that has been documented and that narrative of like black power was real, it was having a transformative effect, and then it was completely like wiped off the face of the earth by this seemingly like
John: like blood wave of drugs that came into the inner cities and the CIA is meanwhile dealing drugs to fund their covert operations.
John: It's just like there's just too much going on there to dismiss it.
Merlin: Well, and here's why, I think, is that, I mean, there was a time, I guess, when there were a lot of rumors.
Merlin: And, you know, I have to understand, like, what we knew about what the CIA did before the 1970s was it was more like what we know the NSA does now, which is we assume everything, but who knows.
Merlin: But, you know, it would be years before we learned a lot about what the CIA had done years earlier.
Merlin: So, but for example, like, let's say you heard a rumor about the extent to which the CIA wanted to disrupt
Merlin: humiliate, and potentially kill Fidel Castro.
Merlin: And if you heard, you would hear that, you might have heard these stories that are so outlandish.
Merlin: They're trying to make his beard fall out.
Merlin: They're trying to make his beard fall out.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But the thing is, apparently they did.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, this is true.
Merlin: Like, trying to poison his food, there are all these different kinds of things.
Merlin: Or...
Merlin: shit, man, look what happened with all the guys and people in Russia being poisoned.
Merlin: You know, that guy who was basically poisoned by Putin.
Merlin: It's like, it doesn't take that many stories where you go, oh, geez, like this really is like three days of the condor.
Merlin: It's really, this is bad.
John: But all of those things you can see, you can picture a guy sitting at his desk
John: With a mustache.
John: And he's like.
Merlin: He's got an assignment.
Merlin: He's on an assignment.
Merlin: Like he has a very specific assignment to like disrupt.
Merlin: I bet for a long time a lot of the CIA was causing chaos, disruption and lack of trust in a given government.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Before you say like, oh, we're going to send in troops.
Merlin: A lot of it might have been like something as simple as make the electricity go off a lot so people don't trust the government.
Merlin: It could be – that's an operational thing I could see people doing at a ground level.
John: Except you can picture five people in a meeting room where they close the door and it goes – and then they flip some switch and the cone of silence comes down.
John: And they're like, OK, here's what we're going to do.
John: But you can't picture five people in a room imagining the scope of –
John: We're going to turn Colombian cocaine into a weapon to destabilize the black power movement.
John: It's just too – there are too many things that have to happen –
Merlin: that where the logical explanation is much simpler to say— There's a simpler and more cost-effective and more secretive way to do it that didn't require all of those contortions.
Merlin: Is seeding contrails with chemicals the best way to do whatever it is you think these people are trying to accomplish?
Merlin: Is that the most effective way to do that?
John: Yeah, and that's...
Thank you.
John: in Asia.
John: And that was, that seems much more organic and natural and plausible than that they were intentionally hooked on drugs by the CIA trying to ruin the inner city.
John: And so there's too many steps in a lot of those conspiracies for it, for it to, for, for me to believe that five guys in a, in a cone of silence had the wisdom to foresee
John: all of this stuff.
John: They're just in there like dummies.
Merlin: And keep it a secret.
Merlin: All of those steps, five guys could not cause that to happen by themselves.
John: So there's a guy with a mustache and a short-sleeved white shirt smoking a cigarette, and he's got an idea.
John: And he never has the authority or the budget to pull off a big idea.
John: No one could ever say chemtrails and then have access to the black budget to create it, right?
John: He'd have to take it up to the head office.
John: The head office is going to say, well, we've also – we're trying to –
John: we're trying to foment a revolution in the following six countries.
John: And we're trying to make Castro's beard fall out.
John: You know, we'll give you a million dollars exploratory funds or whatever.
John: But, you know, so that's the, that's the main stumbling block with most of those conspiracies is like back trace it to the, to the guy in a short sleeve shirt that had the diabolical idea.
John: And then tell me there's any organization in the world where he can, where he can get a PowerPoint demonstration up where they give him the,
John: $600 million to pull off his scheme.
John: And nobody finds out.
John: And nobody finds out.
John: Except you.
John: The chief of staff of the armed forces doesn't have the authority to, and the director of the CIA, they have access to this money, but they don't.
John: It's not like some kind of situation where they just sweep into a room and say, here's the plan.
John: You know, they're bureaucracies.
John: So that's the number one thing that causes me to say 99% of the conspiracy theories would require a Blofeld.
John: and there just aren't any Blofelds.
Merlin: That we know of.
John: Well, I mean, Sergey Brin.
Merlin: All right.
John: Did I just say a magic word?
Merlin: No, that's okay.
Merlin: Can I do that thing where I read to you from the internet?
Merlin: Oh, please.
Merlin: This is the story of James Tilly Matthews.
Merlin: I sent you a link in the robot.
Merlin: 1797, he was the first person documented with what we now call paranoid schizophrenia.
Merlin: And the guy who attended to him was this guy, John Haslam.
Merlin: who wrote a book about what happened with this fella and the thing that he believed was tormenting him.
Merlin: And you'll see that the illustration that was made of this thing called the heirloom, which is the thing.
Merlin: So in the pre-electricity age, this is the machine that was causing him all this trouble.
Merlin: So I thought you'd enjoy this, but I also would like to read to you the name of the book that John Haslam wrote about this, because it's probably my favorite title of a book ever.
Merlin: This is in 1810.
Merlin: John Haslam wrote a book.
Merlin: It was later shortened to Illustrations of Madness.
Merlin: The full title, original title, Illustrations of Madness.
Merlin: Exhibiting a singular case of insanity and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinions, developing the nature of an assailment and the manner of working events with a description of tortures experienced by bomb bursting, lobster cracking and lengthening the brain embellished with a curious plate.
Merlin: Ah, I love the word assailment.
Merlin: So the heirloom, as illustrated here.
Merlin: is what was messing with this guy.
Merlin: The torments induced by the rays of the heirloom included lobster cracking.
Merlin: Sure, you get the lobster cracking.
Merlin: During which the circulation of the blood was prevented by a magnetic field, stomach skinning, and apoplexy working with nutmeg grater, which involved the introduction of fluids into the skull.
Merlin: His persecutors bore such names as the middleman who operated the heirloom, the glove woman, and Sir Archie, who acted as quote-unquote repeaters or active warriors to enhance Matthew's torment or record the machine's activities and their leader, a man called Bill, or the king.
Merlin: Well, you know, as you describe that, and this has been true, I think.
John: It sounds like an HBO show.
John: Well, yeah.
John: Wow.
John: Actually, start writing that script.
John: But his description of his tormentors.
John: it acquits nicely with how I would describe some of the cast of voices in my own head.
Merlin: Like there are characters or voices, not like hearable voices, but like points of view that you can... Points of view that have distinct personalities from one another, right?
John: Where you're walking along and you're in a quietude and some voice says...
John: Hey, dummy, over here.
John: Yeah, it's imperative that we do the following thing.
John: And some other voice says, what?
John: That's the dumbest idea we've ever had.
John: And after a while, you have to acknowledge that these are separate, they have separate viewpoints, and they have personalities, enough to express them, right?
John: But I never, I do not locate those things outside my body.
John: And whatever their torment, it seems like a heated discussion.
John: They aren't like... And in a way, I don't separate myself from them except curiously.
John: Like, who am I?
John: Your dog's not telling you to go out and kill the people on your mail route or something.
John: Right.
John: But the different personalities that he describes in that, you know, just their character names...
John: their player character name, feel very familiar, right?
John: The one that's leading the whole thing named Bill.
John: Or the king.
John: Or the king.
John: Right, Bill or the king, yeah.
John: You know, the various other sort of traits that are implied by those names.
John: So it still feels like...
John: Consciousness and personality are on a continuum or on some sort of bell curve where the vast majority of people are not aware of a chorus of voices.
John: And then as you trail off to a leading edge, there are people that are aware of that group of voices but are managing them.
John: And then at a certain point, those voices become distinct enough that they feel distinct from yourself.
John: Wow.
John: And then there are people, I guess, on the other end who have a singular voice, a very dramatically singular voice.
Merlin: That they're aware of – you're saying that people who are aware of as the voice that is them or a singular voice that is external to them?
John: No, a singular voice that they're aware of as themselves, right?
John: That there is no disagreement within their own mind, that there is a unity of self.
John: And I guess my confusion is I don't know whether that unity of self perspective is at the peak of the bell curve or –
John: And that's the majority or whether that unity of self is also a pathology at the far end.
Merlin: Oh, interesting.
Merlin: Other end of the scale.
Merlin: Super normal, quote unquote, or like uniquely unusual to just have one voice in your head.
John: Yeah, that the mass of people, the normal, let's say, involves some internal deliberation.
John: but not enough where you're saying that these are distinctive personalities that are arguing, but more that you're like, ah, you know, the devil and the angel on your shoulder, right?
John: There's maybe two other perspectives that are kind of arguing with you, but there's not all these, you know, I would, I would describe my own mind as having between six and 12 voices, depending on how quiet I am.
John: Um,
John: And maybe your normal is too, good and evil.
John: And then the other end of it, the other pathology is just this hyper confidence in one's own, you know, the certitude of one's own mind.
John: I don't know enough about it and I'm not sure that it's ever been investigated or discussed in those terms.
John: But yeah, listening to a lot of schizophrenic descriptions, I feel a kinship with the words they use.
John: I just don't know what it would be like to externalize that and be victimized by it and actually hear voices.
Merlin: So there's nothing in those voices that you would find yourself feeling that there's a plausible reason to believe they're coming from anything except just what one might call you.
Merlin: Yeah, my own – They're not being like inserted, distorted, controlled.
John: They're just factions of my own consciousness.
John: And it's part of the mystery of consciousness.
John: But what seems so troubling is just
John: I mean, every once in a while, I'll be in the basement of a house, usually a strange house.
John: I'll have headphones on.
John: I'll be playing the guitar into some kind of, you know, headphone amp.
John: And I'm all dang, dang, dang, dang, dang.
John: And it's night.
John: It's dark at night.
John: And I'm down in the basement making rock music in my headphones.
John: And I will hear, John!
John: from right behind me whoa and i will flip off my headphones and leap across the room you know spinning in midair in total combat pose and i'm all alone and that's happened a few times
Merlin: Oh, creepy.
John: And each time I flee the basement and I go upstairs kind of panting and like, what the fuck?
John: Why do you keep doing that weird voice?
John: Why do you keep shouting in my ear when I'm really having fun playing the guitar?
John: But other than that, nobody's ever like...
John: Faster pussycat, kill, kill.
John: Right.
John: And I wouldn't know what to do.
John: I wouldn't know what to do if that ever happened.
John: And I don't think, I mean, I think I'm long, long past the point where you would have an onset of that kind of mental illness.
John: So I feel like I'm wrestling with what I've got, right?
John: My cards have been dealt and it's absolutely manageable.
John: It's more curious to me.
Merlin: What you're describing also is something I end up thinking about an awful lot.
Merlin: And it's very, very loosely at length kind of related to certain ideas about mindfulness and maybe Buddhism.
Merlin: But it's one thing to feel bad, and it's kind of another thing to feel bad about how you feel bad or feel bad about why you feel bad.
Merlin: And it's strange because how manageable it can be to not mind the fact that you don't feel good today.
Merlin: And to kind of accept it as like, well, you know, there's just days.
Merlin: There's good days and bad days.
Merlin: But like the thing that really drives one, if you like crazy, is this feeling that like you're aware of the badness of how you're feeling.
Merlin: It's not getting any better and it's going on over time.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: Or you're having this constant, you have enough sort of presence of mind to doubt your own perceptions of things.
Merlin: To where you don't trust it and you know you don't trust it.
Merlin: I mean, that's hell to me.
Merlin: It would be one thing to get to where like you're not even aware of how bad your dementia is or something like that.
Merlin: That's awful for sure.
Merlin: But to like see yourself going, oh, I can see where this is heading and it's not good.
Merlin: That seems like the worst.
Merlin: And then you feel bad about it, of course.
John: That was what has been happening to me for several years, right?
John: Where I would just look at a situation and I'd go, there is absolutely no despair inherent in this situation.
John: I am just bringing it.
John: I'm bringing despair into my mind.
John: into mundane situations, right?
John: If you're having a social encounter with someone.
Merlin: Right, like the thing that's happening right now does not have any like valence on its own.
Merlin: Like I'm making this what it is.
John: Yeah, I'm in my own kitchen making a cup of tea.
John: There's no despair.
John: It's all in me.
John: And in that sense, like the way that paranoia factors into it,
John: It's explainable to me or it's – I'm sympathetic to situations where you are – you're socializing with other people and you are bringing despair because the tension when somebody else doesn't understand you, the feeling of isolation from other people, the feeling –
John: that other people are sharing love with each other and you are excluded from that.
John: Like that all makes sense to me, even if it's, even if it is wrong.
John: but I can see where you would get pulled into that.
John: I get pulled into it all the time.
John: If there are five people in a room, there are always going to be moments where I feel like they are all sharing in something that I'm excluded from.
John: And that's not always true.
John: Sometimes I feel like I'm in the center of this friendship, but I'm always vulnerable to getting pulled out of it.
John: But if you're just walking in the forest and looking at the moss,
John: and you feel that isolation and that sense of not belonging, then that's where, that's the bell ringer for me.
John: That it's like, this is a disease of the mind.
John: And I still, I mean, on the Joko Cruz, it's always very complicated.
John: Yeah.
John: Absolutely.
John: Yeah.
John: And to greater or lesser degrees, people don't care about it.
John: But you'll notice that people do care about it because they are first in the dining room to make sure they secure their seat in the right spot.
John: And there are times when I can be high above that and just marvel and laugh and enjoy the way people are and enjoy the kind of social craziness.
Mm-hmm.
John: But there are other times when you're like, I would like to sit next to that person and chat, and instead I'm sitting over here, and I feel alone.
John: But on this particular cruise, I had a moment.
John: We were sailing out of a port, a Caribbean island that I won't name except to say that it's St.
John: Thomas, that I've already had a bad experience of.
John: And I didn't go ashore.
John: So I was on my boat and I was lobbing 12 pound cannonballs at the port all afternoon and we're sailing out and the sun has gone down and we're sailing past St.
John: Thomas, which is a beautiful island to appraise from a quarter of a mile, right from offshore.
John: It's gorgeous.
John: And, uh,
John: And the harbor of Amelie, whatever the town is that we go into, it's one of those perfect harbors where you're just like, this is the most gorgeous place I've ever seen.
John: Surely this town is a tropical paradise.
John: And you get on shore and it's just like, hey, buy tanzanite or whatever.
John: There's nothing there.
John: But as we're sailing out of this harbor and I'm looking at the sunset on the side of the hill and I'm seeing all these Caribbean houses that are perched on the side in a sort of jungle canopy or I'm not, it's not jungle, it's dryer, but like a wooded canopy and it's this beautiful island.
John: And I realized that this was, for a certain number of people, it was their home.
John: They were born there and they never knew anything else.
John: But for a lot of people, this is their fantasy.
John: This is how they express their success in life.
John: This is their ambition.
John: They worked all those years in Winnipeg in order to afford to come to this island and live in that house.
John: And the, and the distance I felt from those people, the feeling that I was looking at this hillside where thousands of people's fantasies were expressed in all these vacation homes.
John: And I felt no kinship with them.
John: I would not have a house there as that is not my fantasy nor my ambition and it, and, and different strokes for different folks.
John: Right.
John: But
John: but I felt so different from them that I had this sudden like feeling of tremendous loneliness where it was like, how, how can that be so, how can I be so detached from that whole idea to one day end up in a home on St.
John: Thomas where there's nothing to do but sit on the porch under a slowly turning fan and drink gin fizzes
John: Nothing about that appeals to me.
John: And watching that whole island just sort of like throb, I felt so profoundly alone that I had to get out.
John: I had to stop looking at the island.
John: I had to put on my shorts and get out of my cabin and go find some people and go up to Sprinkles and get an ice cream cone because I felt such a distance from humanity at that point.
Hmm.
John: And I don't know whether that's a sane reaction or, or a, you know, or an imbalanced one.
John: It feels very, it feels very crazy in the moment, but also I can't find fault with it when I try to explain it.
John: I don't, I, I, I find no, I find no pleasure there.
John: And that is, and there are, and I guess what it was, was I, I just, I saw this archipelago of these places kind of stretching to infinity.
John: Like this is one of the top human fantasies to retire to a tropical island.
John: And I just was like, no, no, no, no.
John: I would rather live in a shipping container buried under the sand in the desert with Fred Durst and Dick Cheney.
John: I'm not sure.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And it's...
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And of course, one of the voices will always say, like, what's wrong with you, dummy?
Merlin: Well, that's exactly right.
Merlin: Like, what is your problem?
Merlin: Why can't you enjoy a tropical island like everybody else?
Merlin: You're the only person that's not spent their whole life looking forward to this.
Merlin: You're getting to do this thing nobody else gets to do that everybody wants to do.
Merlin: Why are you not?
Merlin: First of all, why are you such a sad sack?
Merlin: But like, how can you not be thrilled to be here right now?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I mean, what's crazy about the JoCo cruise is that I love it because my friends are there and we're making fun and I think the sea monkeys are great.
John: But to be on that exact same cruise ship going to that exact same itinerary where there were not sea monkeys and I was not there with my friends would be my worst nightmare.
John: Yeah.
John: And how can you be, how can the same cruise...
John: uh be like so fun and so potentially miserable at the same time it's um it's it's really funny you know it's like what do i want to do i want to go sit in a cafe somewhere uh and drink little teeny cups of coffee and read uh like
John: Like, I guess, read little histories of things, read people's film reviews.
John: You know, why?
John: What is that?
John: What is that?
Merlin: Well, and it's it's funny because, I mean, I always if I ever go somewhere that is primarily a place to go for fun and relaxation, that's different from the everyday stuff.
Merlin: And like, I always feel like I'm doing it wrong.
Merlin: I always feel like it takes me an improbably long time to get into the spirit of whatever it is and not just be somebody rolling their eyes on the sidelines, no matter what.
Merlin: I always feel that way.
Merlin: I can't ever go anywhere once.
Merlin: Let's just call it vacation, even though it may be something as simple as just staying in a hotel for a weekend somewhere.
Merlin: I can't go anywhere once and be good at it.
Merlin: I have to go there like three times to understand how to be somewhere.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: To learn what expectations to have.
Merlin: Here's the kind of activities that this place excels at.
Merlin: And here's the many, many, many other kinds of things that are just not a good idea to try and do here.
Merlin: Stop trying to get a good internet connection.
Merlin: Stop expecting that this will be an authentic hamburger.
Merlin: Go sit on the beach and drink a drink.
Merlin: That's what this place is good for.
Merlin: And that might take me three quarters of the vacation to figure out.
Merlin: But it also, and so it makes me feel like a terrible person, but it also makes me a student of all the other people who are doing it in a weird way.
Merlin: Like, to get to our cabin, we had to walk past the, I guess they call it the library.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: And I'm sure you know what I mean.
Merlin: Like, there's that area you walk past.
Merlin: Yeah, it's full of Ken Follett novels.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: I mean, it is.
Merlin: It's like a bunch of Ann Rule books.
Merlin: It's a bunch, you know, and some, I guess, board games.
Merlin: And you would walk by there and see people who, like, we got a free cruise for doing this.
Merlin: So we were there for free.
Merlin: So at least, you know, I felt like I was losing money, which is another terrible feeling is going somewhere on vacation and realize you're paying to go feel awkward somewhere.
Merlin: But these are probably folks who were paid a pretty good amount of dough to be on this trip.
Merlin: And a lot of times it wasn't sea monkeys.
Merlin: It was other folks who were not affiliated with that part of the cruise.
Merlin: Not unusual at all to walk by and see, like, pfft.
Merlin: three to ten people like sitting in the deck of a ship like reading a borrowed book in a library so i mean no these are not these are not folks who are like like on the deck reading the book they brought these are people who are picking a ken follett book off the shelf and reading it in a a airless room inside of a cruise ship and i assume they're having a good time yeah
Merlin: They're doing what they want to do right now.
Merlin: Or for that matter, let's talk about what's obviously a huge change in focus, I guess, over the years is the amount of gaming that goes on.
Merlin: There are a lot of people who are on one of the lowest decks of the ship in a room with artificial lighting playing board games and having the time of their life.
Merlin: Yeah, which is a very lively atmosphere, very gregarious and warm.
Merlin: And every single person I met down there, they're all weirdos.
Merlin: They were all great.
Merlin: They're all playing Cones of Dunshire or whatever.
Merlin: And they are totally excited to explain everything.
Merlin: And like, would you like to play it?
Merlin: We would be happy to explain this game to you.
Merlin: Well, they're super social with each other, right?
Merlin: I mean, they're having so much fun.
John: Great time because they've found kindred spirits and they don't have to.
John: When I look at that game room, I see a lot of those people and I imagine them in their hometown getting a few friends from work over and saying, hey, let me show you how to play Settlers of Catan.
John: And their friends from work are like, huh, weird.
John: Okay.
John: And they play it.
Merlin: Can we play that iPhone game we saw on Ellen?
John: Yeah, right.
John: They're half-hearted about it.
John: And they're like, meh.
John: And the best situations are ones where it's a couple and they both are really into gaming.
John: But that feeling that they're coming from all over where they're like, I've kind of got my little game group, but two of the people only come half the time.
Yeah.
John: And suddenly they're in a room where everybody is just as everybody recognizes that these games are as fun as I think they are.
Merlin: They're excited.
Merlin: They may be very excited about or even maybe say having developed one of those games or worked on that game.
Merlin: So they're excited about that game.
Merlin: But they're also excited about many of the other games.
Merlin: But it strikes me that they are equally as excited that everybody here is excited about games.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Just the idea of a bunch of people.
Merlin: And this is a big thing in nerd culture is that there is like a very big tent for letting everybody in who's even vaguely interested in this.
Merlin: And like, that's okay.
Merlin: It's a really nice part of nerd culture.
John: One of the things that happened on the last cruise, and I'm not sure if you were there, but it happened again on this cruise was Ted Leo.
John: reading aloud from the Cimmerillion.
John: I heard about this, yeah.
John: And he did it on the first cruise, and I was there kind of sitting at his feet because I wanted to understand what Ted Leo was getting out of it.
John: And so I was like, all right, Ted Leo really wants to read aloud from the Cimmerillion.
John: I'm going to go watch this because I'm curious about this guy, and I want to see what he's on about.
John: And it turns out Ted Leo is a very articulate reader and he knows how to pronounce Elvish names.
John: Wow.
John: He reads Elvish names without any hesitation.
John: And he has a kind of East Coast accent.
John: He definitely sounds like somebody from the East Coast.
John: He sounds like a Connecticut person and not a fancy Connecticut person.
John: But he's reading The Cimmerillion and I was transported.
John: It was like I was a child being read to and I knew enough of this story that I was floating away on it and he was reading from it with such care and such conviction.
John: And I think the cast of people that showed up to that first reading of The Cimmerillion were a lot of the
John: the cooler people on the boat who are like, Ted Leo, yeah, let's go listen to Ted Leo read about the Siberian.
Merlin: And somebody might think, oh, he's slumming.
Merlin: He's catering to the, pandering to the nerds.
John: Yeah, he's on this boat, and he's got this nerdy thing that he's going to do, and ha ha ha.
John: But he was utterly sincere, read this book aloud as though he had read it aloud every day of his life, and breezed through that Tolkienese
John: sort of almost Old Testament style of writing and made the story come alive.
John: And so this year when he said he was going to do it, he was no longer kind of doing it up in the cool bar.
John: He was down in the game room.
John: in a conference room off the side of the game room in a totally windowless place.
John: The only reason you would ever go there is because you were on the cruise with like a Midwestern sales force.
John: And this was where they were having their PowerPoint demonstration, right?
John: The cruise ship has that stuff on there because they cater largely to conventions, right?
John: And so I go in the room and at this point, almost everybody in the room is not a cool person who's there to see Ted Leo do something slummy.
John: It's a bunch of people that want to hear the Cimmerillion read aloud.
John: And the room looks very different.
John: You can hear a pin drop in there.
John: And he, again, reads like so, so artfully.
John: Yeah.
John: From this book, he's telling the story.
John: And, you know, we've talked about the Cimmerillion.
John: It can be impenetrable.
John: But he's telling the story, and you can feel the tragedy in it, and you can feel his.
John: And he never makes a mistake.
John: He never gets halfway through a sentence and goes, and starts over again, right?
John: He's just like, he's gifted at this.
John: And I had another one of the 10,000 experiences I've had interacting with that group of people.
John: Where it's like, this is actually a real thing.
John: This has nothing to do with being a nerd.
John: This is a beautiful moment.
John: And that's what...
John: those are all the touchstones of the Joko Cruz for me when I'm with a group of people who are, who are enthusiasts about a thing.
John: And then I realized that, oh, they're sharing in a moment of, of human beauty that kind of is unrelated.
John: It has nothing to do with like the medium.
John: It's, it's ultimately the message.
John: And it isn't a case where the medium is the message.
John: The medium is, is just the, it's just the box.
Yeah.
Merlin: So what do you think the captain saw when he saw those lights?
John: Fucking ufos?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Like sea ufos.
Merlin: I bet, John, I bet he doesn't tell everybody that story.
Merlin: I got a feeling that was kind of special.
Merlin: Well, yeah, I think so, too.
John: And as we, you know, as we left...
John: I couldn't think of any more questions that I wanted to have an answer from a sea captain about.
John: Like, what's the weirdest shit you ever saw float up out of the ocean?
John: Rogue Wave.
John: Rogue Wave.
John: Have you ever seen anything you couldn't explain?
John: And what's the biggest sea you've ever been in?
John: Like, what else are you going to say?
John: Have you ever saved somebody from quicksand?
John: Oh, I did.
John: I did say, do you ever pick people up?
John: Do you ever, as you're scanning the seas with your flash or your... Captain eyes.
John: Captain eyes.
John: Do you ever find a guy floating on a ricky-ticky-tavy?
John: Hello.
John: And he's like, yeah, we pick people up all the time.
John: Oh, and then the other thing I said was, do you ever see dark ships?
John: Boats that have no call signs, boats that have no running lights, danger boats.
John: And he said, the only boats we see that are like that are Coast Guard boats that are out here lurking.
John: Ooh, wow.
John: And...
John: And when we try to hail them, we're like, hail boat.
John: They go, shh, shh, get off.
John: Wow.
John: And we tease them.
John: We tease them by getting on the radio and saying, like, aloha.
John: And they're like, ixnay, ixnay.
John: Because they're out lurking around those islands trying to find, like, fast boats.
John: But...
John: But when I dug in a little deeper and I was like, no, no, no, I'm talking about some dark ocean.
John: The tour of the ocean.
John: Oh, okay.
John: I didn't know about this.
John: Right?
John: Yeah.
John: What you see is just the tip of the iceberg.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Sure.
John: And he was like, no, no, no, no.
John: It's just always the Coast Guard that's running around without their running lights.
John: That's what he's saying.
John: That's what he tells you.
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: I mean...
John: We were pretty chummy at that point.
John: And I was kind of leaning in a little bit.
John: I was like, come on, come on.
John: Who's out here?
John: And he just, he didn't blow it off like, you know, usually somebody in that position, if they're going to blow something off because they're not supposed to talk about it, they give you a little hint.
Merlin: No, I think he's protecting you.
Merlin: I think he likes you and he likes Will, especially Will, let's be honest.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: I think he's protecting you.
Merlin: He doesn't want you to know too much.
Merlin: I mean, certainly he doesn't want the information traced back to him, but he also doesn't, you're not ready for this.
Merlin: You're not ready to hear this yet.
John: I mean, if he's saying that he sees unexplained lights, you don't think he'd give me a little wink as he said, like, no, there's no dark boats out here.
Merlin: The dark boats might have his wife in the closet with a gun to her head or something or similar, whatever a boat does in order to, like, you know, get you to do something on the secret for him.
Merlin: He thinks there are maybe microphones on the bridge of the freedom of the seas.
Merlin: Well, maybe he knows there's microphones on the bridge in the freedom of the seas.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He might have been very clear about that.
Merlin: You know, we're listening.
Merlin: Every time somebody hits the button in the bathroom, and I'm like, God, I wouldn't want to have to wash that.
John: You think James Earl Jones reaches over and pushes the red button and the torpedo explodes just shy of the boat?
John: And he says, this is the last we're going to talk about this?
John: Which movie is that?
John: Is that Dr. Strangelove?
John: Dr. Strangelove was the one where James Earl Jones rode a submarine down and it exploded in a Cuban town, right?
John: Right.
John: No, it's not that.
John: Yeah.
John: I think that captain would have given me a little wink.
John: He just, he seemed, he's from fucking Winnipeg.
John: It's true.
John: Right?
John: What does he have to, I mean, what's he going back to?
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Yeah.
John: He goes home and feeds his sled dog or whatever.
Merlin: Only you understand me.
Merlin: You know my secrets of the sea.
Merlin: Horse, horse.