Ep. 198: "No Control Group"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Oh, super, super duper.
John: Been having some dairy?
John: Oh, you know, whatever my diet project was, I've changed it a little bit.
John: Oh, you're changing it up a little?
John: Yeah, my new diet plan is to, if it's really possible to poison oneself with normal food, that's my plan.
Merlin: I think you're in luck.
Merlin: I think you can totally poison yourself with normal food.
John: Yeah, that's been my experience.
John: Although there's a problem.
John: There's no control right now.
John: control group because i also there's some kind of raw gas leak into my truck oh god so i'm driving around with all the windows down and i'm and it's like i'm standing at the gas pump in 1974 i know that smell where i'm like whoo i feel a little lightheaded
John: So anyway, I can't tell whether I'm slowly poisoning myself with gasoline or whether I'm slowly poisoning myself with pizza and ice cream.
Merlin: Oh, man, I've had those poisons.
Merlin: You know, there's something kind of comforting.
Merlin: I mean, on the one hand, when you're really trying to solve a problem, it's nice to know exactly what your fucking problem is.
Merlin: I think there's a comfort in not knowing exactly what your problem is.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I mean, I definitely feel comfortable right now.
John: But again, I can't tell whether that's...
John: That I'm poisoning myself with gas.
Merlin: Well, I'm just saying, like, if you had a growing mountain of crack vials on your coffee table, you know, Exhibit A. Right, right, right.
Merlin: I'm saying there's something comforting about, well, it could be pizza, it could be gas.
Merlin: It could be, I mean, how much do you move?
Merlin: Do you move much?
John: Here's another problem.
John: I'm going to the doctor.
John: on Wednesday, and I feel like I haven't been to the doctor in 14 years, but in fact, I have been to multiple doctors.
John: I've just never been... You just don't listen to them.
John: I just don't listen to them, and I just don't feel like I've ever really... The first time I went to the doctor, after a long, long period, I showed up, and the doctor was a lot younger than I was.
John: That happened.
John: And I was not into it.
John: And he was like, oh, well, I think you've got this.
John: I think you've got that.
John: And I was like, yeah, I bet you do.
John: I bet you do, med school.
John: I bet you do, intern.
John: And so I didn't want anything to do with him.
John: So I signed up for a new health care plan.
John: And I'm talking to a lady on the phone who's like, let me help you find a doctor.
John: And I said, I would appreciate that help very much.
John: And she said, here's a doctor who graduated from medical school in 2007.
John: And I said, no thanks.
John: And she laughed and was like, oh, okay.
John: And I said, find the doctor who graduated from medical school the longest time ago.
John: And she found some guy.
Merlin: Can I have a smoker?
John: Yeah.
John: Give me a doctor that has one of those little mirrors on his head.
John: Mirror on his head?
John: He's got one of those kind of double-breasted doctor gowns?
John: Yeah.
John: He's smoking a Winston.
John: For his T-zone?
John: And he's got me.
John: That's right.
John: It's Cools.
John: And he's got a cocktail shaker up on the top of the, you know, like that was my doctor growing up, Dr. Tower.
John: Dr. Tower was a great doctor, but, you know, he's one of those guys that sit down on the stool and say, how's your penis?
John: You know, like a good old doctor.
John: Talk about not having a control group.
Yeah.
John: Take a drag on the cigarette, ash it out the window.
John: He's probably winded.
John: He needs to sit.
John: He's gone up a couple flights of stairs.
John: But the other, I think the control that I've been trying to, I've been trying to keep myself at my current level.
John: And what that has meant is I've realized that a lot of my problems, Merlin, are that I've become a sedentary person.
Merlin: I hate to admit it, but it makes a difference.
John: I'm becoming bed-shaped.
John: And I don't know where that happened.
John: I always walked 10 miles a day.
John: That was always my jam.
John: I was known as the guy that walks around all the time.
John: If you'd be driving somewhere, and there I'd be, walking along with a big sign that says Jesus is coming.
John: And now I sit around.
John: I wake up, I go downstairs, I sit on the couch, I have a cup of coffee.
John: I get up, I walk over to the other side of the house, I sit down.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I'm not out like Roman, and I don't have a regular exercise plan.
John: I've just become this pile.
Merlin: It has so much to do, there's so many factors.
Merlin: And I think one of the biggest factors is where you live, where one lives.
Merlin: Because, I mean, it's just, it seems so obvious until you really think about it.
Merlin: I mean, there are a suburb, I mean, you live in a kind of suburb, I guess.
Merlin: But like a suburb is made to be a place that you drive into and out of.
Merlin: It's meant to accommodate a little bit of walking from place to place.
Merlin: But, you know, as you've seen in Florida,
Merlin: I'm sure there's lots of places where there are no sidewalks.
Merlin: You would never ride a bike on US-19 unless you're really, really hardcore.
Merlin: So I grew up in this era where you would walk to the driveway, then you would drive to the strip mall.
Merlin: In the case of my mom... You'd drive to the walkway.
Merlin: You'd walk to the driveway, drive to the walkway.
Merlin: But I remember having to laugh at my mom.
Merlin: You know, she was aging.
Merlin: So this isn't super funny.
Merlin: But like when it's when it's really crazy hot and you have like knee problems, she would drive to different parts in the strip mall.
Merlin: She would get in her car and drive to a different part.
Merlin: And that's that's part of the thing is like how much does your life accommodate walking?
John: Well, and unfortunately, I do not have sidewalks in my neighborhood.
John: And when I first moved into the neighborhood, I was still in my 10-mile-a-day walking style because I'd been doing that for 15 years.
John: And so I would, you know, I'd walk out the door in the morning and I'd say, I'm going to explore my neighborhood.
John: I'd walk all around.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And my neighborhood was built during, I mean, it was initially built as farm country.
John: And then, you know, the houses moved in, and then during the war there was another layer of houses, and then after the war there was another layer of houses.
John: So now it's just a neighborhood, but no sidewalks.
John: And what I discovered in walking completely exhaustively around my neighborhood is there's no place to return to.
John: Right.
John: You walk along and you're like, oh, this is what happens on this street.
John: And these are these people in the street.
John: But there's no reason to ever go back.
John: There's no cafe.
John: There's no store.
John: There's no.
John: Like, I'm not a guy that's going to go sit in a park and throw a tennis ball to myself.
John: Yeah.
John: And there's nothing about, you know, it's not an interesting neighborhood in the sense that once you figure out.
John: Once you walk around and you're like, oh, okay, here are the farmhouses and they're all separated at this distance from one another.
John: And then inside of those, there are all these houses that were built during the war for workers.
John: And they each had a half an acre.
John: And then within that matrix, there's all these houses built immediately after the war.
John: For young families.
John: And then there are all these houses built in 1980 or 92.
John: But once you see that and you go, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
John: You don't have to go back down that street to see it again.
John: And so when I realized that the only place to go that was interesting was down to the supermarket.
Merlin: You got that one store that's weird.
Merlin: Have they ever started selling half and half?
John: Oh, they never sell anything.
John: They don't even sell.
John: You know, the mark of a store is if you don't sell half and half, do you sell balsa wood rubber band powered airplanes?
John: This place has neither.
Merlin: That used to be a standard.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: goodness remember that you just walk in somewhere and get a comic book you could get you could get uh you get some bazooka joe and you get a balsa wood airplane and that's the thing is those don't last that's a good thing to keep in stock because you're going to need like several of those i always the negotiations i had with my dad were can i get this comic book can i get two comic books which he would generally shut down
John: And then at the point of purchase, at the cash register, can I get this Balsa Wood airplane?
John: And Balsa Wood airplanes at the time were what?
John: 50 cents?
John: 25 cents?
Merlin: You're probably in the 35 cent range for comics at that point.
Merlin: It feels like for all of my youth in comics, Marvel comics were always 35 cents.
Merlin: And I feel like one of those, you're going to get maybe 50 cents for one of those planes.
John: 50 cents for a plane.
John: And...
John: And depending on his mood, I might get a comic book and a balsa wood airplane.
John: And then I would immediately, we had the neighborhood kids had a piece of plywood on a couple of sawhorses that we used as an aircraft carrier for balsa wood airplanes.
John: Oh, nice.
John: So that you wouldn't throw it.
John: You'd actually wind it up and then sit it on its wheels at one end of this piece of plywood and it would run off and fly.
John: My greatest triumph.
John: Probably in my life.
John: Yeah.
John: Was one time I set a plane off.
John: It went up in the air, looped around, and came back and landed on the same piece of plywood.
John: That's a black swan.
John: You don't see that every day.
John: The performance characteristics of those were very uneven.
John: Oh, my God.
John: 20% of the time, they would just plummet into the ground and break immediately.
Merlin: Immediately, but even if you got, you have to figure out the peculiarities to what angle to make the wing go, what angle to make the tail fin go, and then by the time you figured that out, it was broken.
John: It was broken, right.
John: But I did this and all the kids, it was one of those things that sometimes you see on the internet now where some kid hits a three-point shot from 40 feet away or whatever it is, some amazing skateboard trick.
John: And all of his friends all drop to their knees in incredulity.
John: And when I scored this balsa wood, what can you do except flop on the ground and make the universal sound, which is, oh!
John: They're probably still talking about it today.
John: I'm never going to reach those heights again.
John: What could I do now where everybody would drop to their knees and go, oh.
John: think about it what what what could you possibly do where first of all where would you ever be where you were there with five friends yeah and then secondly what are you getting a google chat or something and just be like just just drop some google chat science on people yeah yeah no what what am i going to do i'm not going to hit a baseball out of a out of a park you'd have to warm up a lot
John: I used to be able to do that, hit a baseball hard.
Merlin: I used to be a hitter.
Merlin: I was a hitter.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I had the highest average on my team for a while because I didn't play very much.
Merlin: It's called playing the numbers.
Merlin: Merlin was the star hitter.
Merlin: I batted 760 for a while.
Merlin: The thing is, I didn't play very much, and I wasn't good, and I couldn't catch the ball.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to my daughter's desire to avoid activity, especially team sports.
Merlin: And it drives my wife crazy.
Merlin: Because I should be there.
Merlin: I should be there pulling, saying, hey, you know, it's good.
Merlin: You know, you should do brownies.
Merlin: You should do soccer.
Merlin: You should do all of the things, you know, because character.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I'm like, all I think is like, oh, God, just having to go somewhere, wear an outfit and sit in the sun on a bench.
Merlin: And then just be envious of everyone.
Merlin: Envious and tired.
Merlin: That's my bio.
John: And Madeline feels like it is important to build character for a child to be schlepped around and put through childhood ringers.
Merlin: That's a very good question.
Merlin: And we actually are not so far off on this.
Merlin: What we do realize is that, I mean, not to beat this into the ground, but I have an ongoing concern about the incursion of institutions into my child's free time or my child's child time, really.
Merlin: And even though she's only, she's about to finish second grade, but, you know, if she did her homework really well, like, and did the spelling and did the assignments, did all of that, she would have, like, half an hour a day to be a kid.
John: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: How do we get our children out of this?
John: How do we let them achieve escape velocity from this madness?
Merlin: Well, I think that's a very good question.
Merlin: I think there are probably a couple ways.
Merlin: And I think the one that's – here's the thing.
Merlin: First of all, I mean I had a feeling this would be true with reading and it definitely in my child's case turned out to be true with reading, which is like if your child is very interested in something –
Merlin: whether that's a cartoon show or Minecraft or princesses or whatever, if they're interested, they will learn to read a lot faster.
Merlin: I think this is a kind of pseudo-documented thing.
Merlin: Like if your kid is just, you know, if you just put, with all respect, I know you love the Dick and Janes, if you put like perfunctory books in front of your kid, it's going to feel like school.
Merlin: But if they're very like incentivized, they will learn to read.
Merlin: So part of it is finding a cart that you can hook that horse to and it won't mind.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So in some cases, that's just running around in the park.
Merlin: The other thing is, and this is, again, something Louis C.K.
Merlin: said, I think I've mentioned this here before, something Louis C.K.
Merlin: said a few years ago, that when I heard it before I had a kid, I giggled, but now it's true.
Merlin: You know the reason you can't have that?
Merlin: You can't have that because you want it.
Merlin: You know why you have to do that?
Merlin: You have to do that because you don't want to do it.
Merlin: So my feeling is, and I'm almost done, my feeling is for stuff like let's go take a walk after dinner.
Merlin: That's a good pseudo-forcing thing.
Merlin: Committing to like five years of scouts or whatever, like not so much.
Merlin: Because they, you know, they should get a chance to have those preferences.
Merlin: Sometimes, and the thing is, our kid bounces back.
Merlin: So if we force you to go on a walk after dinner, which can be a lovely thing to do, you know.
Merlin: That is a nice thing to do.
Merlin: In the nice, cool, you know, spring air.
Merlin: she ends up having a good time then she doesn't want to go back yeah this is just how it works but so i think it's a combination of figuring out you know and i'm not just saying this to be like some stupid liberal parent of our time but i think it's true for any time like you figure out what your kid is interested in and then let them discover it more on their own that's all the incentive they need apart from the things you force them to do which you gotta do when you go for a uh after dinner walk with your family do you and your wife hold hands
John: um no sometimes yeah no sometimes it's not it's no it's not a typical thing i don't think you do that till you're old well i was just the reason i asked i was just driving here and i saw a couple walking along in silence both with kind of frowny faces walking along a strange strip of the road where i seldom see anyone walking holding hands and
John: They both had frowny faces on.
John: They weren't talking to each other.
John: They were just walking but holding hands.
John: And I was like, hmm, holding hands.
John: That's a way of expressing affection for another person.
Merlin: Or just letting the world know that you're chained together for eternity.
John: Here we are.
John: Here we are.
John: I can't get this other person off of me.
Merlin: It's almost like you're both holding the plunger for the explosive device, and you don't want the other person to get it exclusively.
Merlin: Just assume there's a plunger in their hand.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Contact.
John: Walking down the street.
John: Oh, see, I was thinking toilet plunger.
John: Oh, that'd be adorable.
John: Wow, that's a real commitment.
John: I don't want to do this.
John: You don't want to do this.
John: Let's do this together.
John: Clork, clork, clork.
Merlin: Yeah, you borrow that at a gas station to go to the bathroom and you keep it and that becomes a temple for your relationship.
Merlin: Oh, right, because it was the key to the bathroom was on the toilet plunger.
John: Yeah.
John: I feel like the number one problem in my life, and I'm extending this to my life with my child, is that I don't get up early enough.
John: I keep wanting there to be 28-hour days.
John: And the reason I want there to be 28-hour days is that I want to get up at 11 and
John: 1030.
John: And then I want to have access to an entire day.
John: And I feel like if you got up at, if you were one of those parents that took your kid to swim, swimming and got up at five in the morning, I don't know how people do it.
John: Where is the time to do all these things?
John: Because when in the, in the afternoons,
John: We do one thing, as you're saying, and then it's 20 o'clock or something.
John: I know.
John: You know, like it's all over so fast.
John: I don't know how other people do it.
John: And when I was young, it seemed like days just stretched into eternity.
John: And now I wake up, I go downstairs, I sit on the couch, I have a cup of coffee, and then, of course, you take a little nap then.
John: And then you get up, you make a peanut butter sandwich, and it's fucking 1130.
John: I completely agree.
John: I completely agree.
John: What are you supposed to do?
John: I mean, and I keep, honestly, I cannot accept...
John: I cannot accept 24 hour days and I keep feeling, I keep rebelling against them in my spirit and saying, this is outrageous.
John: How can you limit a day to 24 hours?
John: Why is the, is the, is the earth getting closer to the sun?
Merlin: Is that what's happening?
Merlin: compression going on because I feel the same way and part of it is for me and I don't want to just say it's a matter of getting older all that that's certainly a factor but it takes me more time to get kind of ramped up to where I want to be and for me to get ramped up to where I want to be I get about a half hour starting around two and then my sugar rapidly drops and I'm basically ready to just watch TV and go to sleep yeah and that if that let me ask this is a question for the physicists in our audience if the earth started spinning faster
John: Would the clocks also start spinning faster due to relativity?
Merlin: Well, I think it's probably relativity.
Merlin: It's probably a little bit of science.
Merlin: I think what happens is, though, what if your measuring tools are changing, too?
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Go on.
Merlin: Go on.
Merlin: Well, I'm just saying, if the Earth is changing with regards to rotation or sun placement or becoming slightly oblong, I don't know all the exact reasons, but the thing is, how would you know?
Merlin: How could you know?
Merlin: Because maybe your tools are getting changed as well.
John: Well, now this is my question.
John: If clocks started going faster, would we retain our perception of how long days used to be?
John: Would we maintain some kind of autonomy from this?
John: Or what if our days are only a millisecond long and we don't know it?
John: Whoa.
John: Right?
Merlin: Yeah, right, right.
John: But so I've been noticing that Orion appears to be lower and lower in the sky all the time.
Merlin: like it's like it's just slipping a little bit oh yeah like out of the firmament i look up and i'm like wait a minute that's not where you are that's not where you belong that's an interesting that's an interesting thing and i'm as you know i'm not an astronomer but but but it's interesting to me that like you know first of all orion is the one constellation i can almost always find this could be an availability heuristic i'm finding orion a lot easier than i would like i think maybe it's had some kind of promotion maybe it's got special offers by amazon but there's something where i feel like i'm seeing too much orion
John: You feel like it's a promoted tweet or it's something that's been... I don't even know.
Merlin: How would I even know?
John: Bumped up in your timeline?
John: Well, I feel like I would know because I have marked it in my imaginary space place.
John: You know, in my terrarium, when I lay back and look up at my terrarium, there it is.
John: It belongs in a certain place.
John: So I'm afraid that there might be some acceleration happening and we are just, we're separated from it.
John: Maybe it's all the jumping up in the air I do.
John: Every time I jump up in the air, the earth, like I'm somehow, I become detached from the earth long enough for me to notice that time is accelerating.
Merlin: Whoa.
Whoa.
John: Huh.
John: Maybe I should stop jumping up in the air.
John: Maybe I should just submit to my earthboundedness.
Merlin: What if you could only become aware of these minute changes in the time that you had self locomotivated up into the air on your own?
Merlin: What if that was your single moment of clarity was the amount of time that you could propel yourself into the air?
Merlin: What if we learned that insight could only come from jumping in the air?
Merlin: I'm not talking about gliding.
Merlin: I'm not talking about space kites.
Merlin: I'm not talking about plane parachuting.
Merlin: I'm saying you've got to do it.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: I'm going to say trampoline is cheating.
Merlin: The universe would know.
John: Right, right.
John: No, you have to actively and independently resist gravity.
John: It's like the Matrix.
John: Because we don't even know what gravity is, bro.
John: Nobody really knows.
John: So maybe gravity is just like an inhibitor.
John: It's an inhibitor.
Merlin: Oh, it's like a governor on one of those U-Haul trucks.
John: Yeah, it's a governor, right?
John: You can't go faster than 55 miles an hour unless you jump.
Mm-hmm.
John: I'm not saying this is like canonical science.
Merlin: Well, I mean, this is really such a thing.
John: Yeah, thank you.
Merlin: I mean, if it's canonical, it can't be science.
John: I share that.
Merlin: I get more into spirituality at that point, right?
Merlin: Or literature.
Merlin: There's a lot of spirituality in what we're saying.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: I think more people need to get with that.
John: I have faith...
John: I seriously do have faith that I'm going to be able to accomplish a 28-hour day one day.
Merlin: Faith gets a bad rap because it gets closely associated with the Jesus.
Merlin: And that's fine for what it is or the whole idea of God writ large.
Merlin: Trouble is, you can have faith about lots of things that you don't have any evidence for.
Merlin: I guess it could be a kind of magical thinking.
Merlin: I prefer to think of it as spiritual thinking.
John: I had a question the other day.
John: Let's say I was in the Abu Dhabi airport.
John: Okay.
John: And I wanted to buy a talisman of some kind at an expensive jewelry store.
John: I wanted to buy some commemorative necklace.
John: And let's say I was walking through the Abu Dhabi airport.
John: Like if you're walking through the Vatican City airport.
John: They got an airport?
Yeah.
John: Yeah, it's a little airport.
John: Seems like you'd go to Rome.
John: Well, sure, but you'd go to Rome if you can't afford to fly out of Vatican City.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: It's bespoke.
Merlin: Right, right?
John: I mean, it's like, if you have to ask, is there an airport in Vatican City?
John: There isn't one.
John: You can't afford it, right.
John: But let's say I'm walking through the Vatican City airport and I bought a little, let's say I bought a religious icon in the shape of a cross.
John: And let's say I encounter a cardinal.
John: We're waiting for our flight.
John: It's southwest, right?
John: Is that where you line up?
John: Yeah, there's going to be a little tussling, right?
John: We're both in group two.
John: And I'm like, hey, Cardinal.
Merlin: Mitre, mitre, mitre, mitre, Filson bag, mitre, mitre.
John: Well, let's say I've been in Vatican City long enough that I've got a crooked staff.
John: Okay.
John: But I put some jingles on it, so it's a jingle staff.
John: But I want this little cross imbued with some religiosity, imbued with some magic.
John: If I turn to the cardinal and I say, Cardinal, would you bless my little talisman?
John: Because I'm going to give it to my daughter as a protector against the unknown.
John: The dark arts, yeah.
John: Right.
John: I don't know, but I think that a cardinal could go a domine spiritu sanctu on it.
John: Right?
John: And then it would be more magical.
John: It'd be imbued.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: No, I mean, it's not unlike what you might call a blessing.
Merlin: And I suspect that they have, once you reach the level of cardinals, it's probably like a free buffet.
Merlin: Like, you can imbue or charm or bless probably as many things as you want.
Merlin: You could probably even accept a gratuity for it.
John: Sure, right?
John: Let's say I slip him a five and I say, put a little bit of...
John: mojo on this.
John: Let's say you put some English on it.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And then I can give this little cross to my kid and who knows what it will protect against.
John: There's no, again, no control group.
John: But better to have it than not, right?
John: Better to have a deathbed conversion than to just go into the unknown and maybe you die and you're like, boo-ha-ha.
Merlin: Well, it's like Pascal said, you know, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd do any good.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: It's not, I mean, you know, who's it hurting?
John: Well, so this is what I'm asking.
John: I do not know enough about Islam to know if I'm in the Abu Dhabi airport and I buy some sort of talisman that has a little glyph on it, if I see an imam walking through the airport, which I surely would,
John: Can I walk up to the imam and say, put a little English or a little Arabic on this little guy and give me some Allah power?
John: Or is that not a thing that they do?
John: Because it seems like Islam is more not into witchcraft.
Merlin: It's almost like getting an autograph from God.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: So you're worried a little bit.
Merlin: It sounds like if I hear you, you're saying, would it work?
Merlin: First of all, let's talk in terms of efficacy.
Merlin: Can I get an imam to bless my glyph?
Merlin: But also, is it socially acceptable in the Abu Dhabi airport to walk up to an imam and ask for some kind of a, like a, you know, a guardian leviosa, some kind of a, give me a spell, give me a charm here.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
John: If an imam, this is what I don't know about Islam, if an imam lays hands on a glyph,
John: Does it imbue?
Merlin: I bet it's a lot like Harry Potter.
Merlin: I bet we are muggles, right?
Merlin: Didn't you read this when you were in a brig on a ship?
Merlin: You read Harry Potter when you were in a ship jail?
Merlin: I feel like I was living in a closet, yeah.
John: Oh, you're in the cupboard under the stairs?
John: Yeah, I was.
John: Yeah, I was in a...
John: You're so much like Harry Potter.
John: No, I was in a bureau.
John: I walked into the bureau.
Merlin: You go into the wardrobe and you get a fur coat?
John: Yeah, there was some kind of lion in there.
John: And I had nothing to do, nowhere to go to.
John: And there were four or five Harry Potter books in this wardrobe, and I consumed them.
John: So I have enough knowledge that if somebody uses the word muggle, I can nod knowingly.
John: I can go, ah, yes.
Merlin: Ah.
Merlin: Right.
John: If somebody says the Red Wedding, I can go, yeah, the Red Wedding.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: Hodor, Hodor, Hodor.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I know what you mean.
Merlin: And the thing is that you want to be careful.
Merlin: It is a lot like the Imams, with all due respect to the Hogwarts community.
Merlin: You don't want to go head to head with the Harry Potter people.
Merlin: I mean, the thing is, I'm very late to Harry Potter, so my Harry Potter jokes are already like 15 years old.
Merlin: And I just don't know it yet.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: But it's a lot.
Merlin: Okay, here's what we do know.
Merlin: As you get further into the books, you get into like, you know, three, four, five, you get into understanding you got the Ministry of Magic.
Merlin: And part of the job of the Ministry of Magic, you take somebody like Arthur Weasley, his job is to look at stuff that's happening with the muggles.
Merlin: We got to keep this copacetic.
Merlin: We need to make sure that they don't find out too much about what the wizarding world is up to.
John: No, you don't want the mothers.
Merlin: That's a lot like Islam, I think.
Merlin: I mean, not in a bad way, but in that, you wouldn't walk up to Dumbledore in the Vatican Airport and ask him to bless your wand.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: Well, I do.
John: My problem with Harry Potter, I know you just said do not go up against the Harry Potter people.
John: It's up to you, buddy.
Merlin: You're going to get some owls.
Merlin: What I'm saying is Quidditch isn't a real game.
Merlin: Quidditch is...
Merlin: This should just be a quarterly segment on this show.
Merlin: My daughter was explaining how Quidditch is not actually bullshit, but I don't buy her explanation of it.
Merlin: I still think it's bullshit.
Merlin: If you play Chutes and Ladders...
John: You know what's going to happen, right?
John: You go down the chute if you roll the dice wrong or whatever.
John: I haven't played chutes and ladders in a long time.
Merlin: Well, like Candyland.
Merlin: Actually, we have a way that we play it where we've added some strategy.
Merlin: Some consequences?
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: I thought you were going to say consequences.
Merlin: The only way I've been able to bear Candyland since she was about two was to add some strategy to it, which I have done.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: But it's still largely a game of chance, but I take your meaning.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: And it seems to me that Quidditch is sort of like watching the television show Lost.
John: As long as you don't care if it makes any sense, you can enjoy it.
John: Yeah, right.
John: That's precisely it.
John: Everybody's chasing around, chasing around, and really all it is is about catching this little ball.
Merlin: If you catch a little ball, it's my understanding that if you catch... This is where my daughter schooled me.
Merlin: We were walking home the other day, and she told me... I was telling her how Quidditch is bullshit, which we always talk about.
Merlin: And she says, no, actually, it's not.
Merlin: Because my understanding was, as soon as your seeker catches the snitch, two things happen.
Merlin: You get 150 points, and the game is over.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: What she's telling me, and again, write my daughter, not me.
Merlin: But what she says to me is, no, but here's the thing.
Merlin: If the other side has gotten like 250 points, but hasn't gotten the snitch, cotton...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't I didn't I didn't know you could put up those kinds of numbers, but apparently it's like cricket.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like Premier League cricket.
John: Like a month.
John: Yeah.
John: The games are 40 years long.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We're apparently in Quidditch.
Merlin: The game can go on so long that you could actually go and train new people who don't know about Quidditch to be replacements by the time the end of the game comes around.
Merlin: But so side two, let's say, let's say Slytherin is up to, they're up to 250 points, right?
Merlin: Catching the little.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: They got, they, they got the bludger and they've been putting legitimate Quidditch points on the Quidditch board.
Merlin: And then fucking Harry Potter comes along.
Merlin: He catches the snitch.
Merlin: Guess what happens?
Merlin: Two things.
Merlin: Number one, boom, 150 points.
Merlin: Number two game ends.
Merlin: Trouble is, are you looking on this?
John: Yeah.
John: Okay.
John: The game ends automatically whether, as soon as you catch the flying, the winged ball.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Then the game is over whether you want it to be or not.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: So if that's true and I don't really care whether it is because the game is still bullshit, that makes it interesting and strategic.
Merlin: It becomes a little bit like cricket or one of those terrible games of football where you just try to run down the clock.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's the worst.
Merlin: If you're watching the football and you get in the other team, I don't know if you can do that anymore because of, you know, timers and stuff.
Merlin: But it used to be you would just do lots of like, I'm not really going to try and the clock would run down.
Merlin: Yeah, you'd run the Heisman over and over.
Merlin: You'd run a Heisman or a flea flicker?
Merlin: Yeah, you'd do a flea flicker.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: So I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know what this has to do with Islam, but I imagine there are rules that are hard for any Muggle to understand outside the community.
John: Well, I'm never – see, I don't even understand all the rules of Catholicism.
John: But at least within Catholicism – They got books.
John: You can look it up.
John: They have – well, I can read the books.
John: But also, you know, there's a lot of signifying that happens with the hats.
Right.
John: You look at a Catholic priest of some kind, and the vestments tell the tale.
John: The taller the hat, the... The longer the chat?
Merlin: There you go.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: The taller the hat, the thicker the... The thicker the mat.
Or the...
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Merlin: Yeah, right.
John: Yeah, the thicker the mat.
John: Thicker the mat.
John: So, but within Islam, it seems like there's a lot, there's more of a sort of humility action where the imams are not, as they get bigger, as they get more influential, they don't put gold braid on their shoulder pads.
Mm-mm.
Merlin: It's just all... Like Jonathan Price on Game of Thrones.
Merlin: He's a big gun.
Merlin: No spoilers.
Merlin: He's a big gun in this religious cult, but he still dresses like a hobo.
Merlin: That's part of the thing.
Merlin: He's wearing a gunny sack.
Merlin: He's wearing a gunny sack.
Merlin: He's not going to have a gunny sack with epaulets.
Merlin: Actually, that would be a pretty smart look.
John: And if you're looking at Orthodox rabbis, the longer the beard... The quicker the...
John: The greater the weird.
John: Longer the beard.
John: The greater the weird?
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Like, so you can tell the big-time rabbis, for the most part, by the grayness of the beard.
Merlin: Or the curly sideburns.
Merlin: If you get a big, long, curly sideburn, that means you've been in the game for a while, assuming you don't have extensions.
Merlin: Mazel tov.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Well, you see a lot of young guys with long pages.
Merlin: I've seen some guys sporting some serious, and they got the little, they got the Cyclops packets on their head that's got a prayer in it.
Merlin: Is that right?
No.
John: Yeah, well, they nail it to the door.
John: They nail it to the outside of the door.
Merlin: Oh, to let God know that they killed the lamb, so don't hurt my kid.
John: Yeah, it gets a little confusing to me there, too.
Merlin: Think about this.
Merlin: Why is this day different from all other days?
Merlin: Mondays, am I right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The other thing to think about is, and I don't want to get us in trouble.
Merlin: I think we're already in trouble.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Think about another recently minted pseudo-religious movement that started in, let's say, the 50s or 60s that came along that involves free stress tests in boats.
Merlin: Right, let's say.
Merlin: Okay, for the sake of argument, this could be a lot of different modern religious movements.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But what do we know about that?
Merlin: Well, the answer is officially not much, and that's the point.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Because you've got to move up through your levels.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.
Merlin: When you're a one or a two, you're a one or a two, you're basically writing checks.
Merlin: You get to level three and stuff starts to happen.
Merlin: And then you get that level where your eyes will blow out if you're not ready to read it.
John: So what happens if you get up to the 33rd level?
John: 33rd level, right.
John: You get the apron, they push you off a cliff.
John: Okay.
John: You go through the spanking machine.
John: And then you realize that it's ufos.
John: It's always been ufos.
John: Yeah, all the way down.
Yeah.
John: But the thing is, if I bump into a 33rd degree, let's say, for instance, member of this religion that is based on science.
John: Sure.
John: Am I going to know?
John: Is there going to be something where they've got like the sides of their hair is white, sort of like Jimmy Two Fish or whatever?
Merlin: Okay.
John: Or is it a thing where their eyebrows get really hectic?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, you're talking about like from the spice.
Merlin: Something happens where there's an accumulation of something, whether that's hair or the spice or wisdom or various UFO powers, but something that would show you that this person's, they've been in the shit.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Some kind of like sheen to their coat or brightness in their eyes or their teeth and gums look good.
John: A cold nose.
John: cold-nosed, some way to identify a high-ranking member of this particular knowledge?
Merlin: That's a really good question.
Merlin: That's what I'm interested in.
John: I understand hierarchical systems is what I'm saying.
John: And in situations where your Jonathan Pryce is in a gunny sack,
John: You can tell, at least no spoilers, but you can tell he is the most humbly dressed.
John: And so even there, there's a system in place where you can say the old guy in the gunny sack is the top dog.
John: Oh, this is the cup of a carpenter.
John: Yeah, exactly right.
Merlin: He's pitching his humility.
Merlin: You pull a Gandhi.
Merlin: Like the guy in the underwear right over here.
Merlin: He's the head guy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Over here.
Merlin: They got no soup.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This guy over here.
John: Not me.
John: Not me.
John: So, yeah, exactly.
John: Like Gandhi's wearing homespun diapers.
John: He could he could afford nicer ones.
John: He could afford a lot nicer ones.
John: Have you ever seen that picture of a young Gandhi when he was a lawyer in South Africa?
Merlin: He was incredibly handsome.
Merlin: Wearing a three-piece suit with a tall collared shirt.
Merlin: He looks tremendous.
Merlin: He looks like somebody that could work for Chase Bank who got a tan.
Merlin: He looks tremendous.
Merlin: He does look tremendous.
Merlin: He's a very handsome young man.
Merlin: Was he a Hindu, John?
Merlin: I mean, as far as we know.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Let's say yes.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Let's say yes for the sake of argument.
Merlin: But it could be, it really throws a loop when you think, you think about the guy in the underwear with the crowds and then you find out that, you know, he was, he was, he was a lawyer, you know?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Not that you can't be a lawyer in a diaper.
Merlin: One of my, one of the great Morrissey songs, but, but, but still it's, it's very, it's very interesting.
Merlin: He pictures him in what?
Merlin: The twenties, the teens, the twenties.
Merlin: He's, he's, he's all decked out in, in Western wear.
Merlin: Western wear.
Merlin: I mean, not like John Travolta, but.
John: Yeah, Western wear.
John: Yeah, he's got the lariat.
John: He's got a Mickey's.
John: But my feeling is that you've got to be able to look at a cleric.
John: and recognize some quality in them.
John: Like David Koresh had the darkest sunglasses.
Merlin: Oh, Jim Jones, dark sunglasses.
Merlin: Also dark sunglasses.
Merlin: He had a big chair.
Merlin: Didn't he have a big wicker chair he liked to sit in?
John: Jim Jones had a big chair.
John: I don't think David... There wasn't room in David Koresh's compound for a big chair.
John: But he did have like a virgin deflowering bed.
John: Okay.
John: Something...
John: To communicate to everybody that he's the big wheel.
John: Okay.
John: Okay.
John: And so that's where I get lost.
John: Like, I walk around...
John: I walk around with a kind of tempo.
John: That's right.
John: It's all about tempo in my religion.
John: It's not even a meter.
John: It's a tempo.
John: You've got a groove.
John: Yeah.
John: If you see me walking around, you'll notice that I have a tempo which communicates that I am the leader of my cult.
John: That's true.
John: And you would be able to pick me out of a crowd.
John: You've got 40 people walking around in a big circle, let's say.
John: Right.
John: Oh, I see what you're saying.
John: And you'd say, you'd look around and you'd be like, it's just a bunch of undifferentiated people walking in a circle.
John: Right.
John: But that's not actually the case.
John: That's right.
John: Then you would say, there's one person that's got a little bit different tempo.
Merlin: I felt that way about Robert De Niro walking around in the EMT uniform in heat right before he steals the ambulance.
Merlin: And I'm thinking, you know what?
Merlin: You totally know that's fucking Robert De Niro.
John: Yeah.
John: You're not going to mistake that guy for just an ambulance driver.
Merlin: No, he's at least a paramedic.
Merlin: This is the thing about movies that's fake.
Merlin: Yeah, it's true.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: It's like Quidditch.
Merlin: You get people to come in there and pretend that they're somebody else.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think there's a lot of similarities.
Merlin: Because here's the other thing, though.
Merlin: I think this is true in the wizarding world.
Merlin: I'm almost positive this is true in the science religion from the 50s.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: And I'm wondering now—I have to tell you, as I sit here today, I'm wondering if this is true of all religions, wizarding or otherwise—
Merlin: You get a certain idea about what this thing is.
Merlin: You go to vacation Bible school.
Merlin: You make things with popsicle sticks.
Merlin: They pour water on your head.
Merlin: You get to drink some wine.
Merlin: Five, 10, 15 years go by.
Merlin: You're just moving up a, you know, just a little curve.
Merlin: You're learning more.
Merlin: But you're deepening your knowledge.
Merlin: You're deepening your knowledge of well-known topics.
Merlin: The thing is, as far as I know in Christianity, there's not a day when they say, okay, let's tell you what's really going on here.
Merlin: You don't reach a certain level where you've tithed enough.
Merlin: You get behind the curtain.
Merlin: You become a six or a seven in Jesus, and you move up, and they say, no, no, no, this is actually, you know, actually, it's all about lizard people.
John: Well, we don't know, though.
Merlin: We don't know because I've never been there.
John: When you go into the cathedral in Sevilla,
John: And they come out from behind the gold tower, which all the big churches have.
John: They're going to have a gold tower.
John: And the priests don't come walking down the aisle like they're getting married.
John: They float?
John: No, and they're not coming up on a dumbwaiter.
John: They're coming out.
John: They're coming out from behind the gold tower.
John: You don't know what's back there.
John: It could be a jello.
John: It could be a giant book that says it's all about the lizard people.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's like when somebody gets when somebody gets locked in the gift shrunk.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know, this is dangerous information.
Merlin: Not everybody can know about this.
John: It's why the the election for the U.S.
John: president happens on November 3rd.
John: But they don't swear him in until January 15th or whatever.
Right.
John: Because that's the amount of time.
Merlin: I forget they're just getting porn off their drives.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: They're taking them to Area 51.
John: They're taking them 40 stories down into the underground caverns.
John: And they're introducing them to Gleep Glop.
John: And they're saying, all right, now you're the president.
John: You got to know Gleep Glop.
John: And Gleep Glop's like, bop beep, bop beep, bop beep.
John: And the president's like, shit!
John: People can't know about this, and all the generals with the braid on their hats are like, that's right.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: But what if Kleep Glop is just the cover story?
Merlin: Like, what if Area 51, is that what it's called?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Like, what if that is the plausible cover story for something that's actually much more fucked up?
Merlin: That's what I'm saying.
Merlin: It's Kleep Glops all the way down.
Merlin: You go and you meet Kleep Glop, and they go, you know what?
Merlin: Now you're an OT1.
Merlin: Welcome.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Hold these soup cans.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: Because it's about to get really fucking weird.
John: That's how it happens all the time.
John: The first Rolling Stone you meet is Bill Wyman.
John: And you're like, shit.
John: That's from that book, The Five Rolling Stones You Meet in Heaven.
John: Yeah, I'm meeting a Rolling Stone.
John: Holy shit, you fall on the ground.
John: You're like, whoa.
Merlin: It's like landing a skateboard trick.
Merlin: You say to your friends, holy shit, guess what?
Merlin: I got to meet one of the Rolling Stones.
Merlin: And you go, holy shit, was it Mick?
Merlin: And they go, no.
Merlin: Was it Keith?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Was it Charlie?
John: No.
John: Was it Roger Waters?
John: No.
Merlin: It was Bill Wyman.
Merlin: I got to meet some of Rainbow.
Merlin: And then you realize, oh, it's Bill Wyman.
Merlin: You go, that's pretty cool.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Is he still in the band?
Merlin: No, Bill Wyman hasn't been in the band since the 90s.
Merlin: No, he's not in the band anymore.
Merlin: That's cool you got to meet him.
Merlin: That's nice.
Merlin: Bill Wyman's going to make the 90s look like the 60s.
John: But that's the thing.
Merlin: I got to meet Rayman Zarek's left hand.
John: That's the bass player of the band.
Yeah.
John: You meet Kleep Klopp.
John: You're 40 stories under the desert.
John: Hello.
John: And you're like, shit, I'm the president of the United States.
John: He's just sitting there sipping sun tea, watching his stories on TV.
John: Yeah, but Kleep Klopp's got a teleprompter inside of his heads-up display, inside of his giant eyeball.
John: Really?
John: There's a little feedback on the mic.
John: And he's like, hold on, hold on, hold on.
John: I'm getting a message from the big transmitter in the sky.
John: But really, it's three guys in a room on the 43rd floor.
John: Right.
John: They're like, Gleep Glop, here's what you tell the president.
John: Okay.
John: Right?
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: Everything you had guessed was true.
Merlin: I'm the only one of my kind.
Merlin: I totally came here in the 50s.
Merlin: Gleep Glop.
Merlin: Gleep Glop.
Merlin: Because they wouldn't tell him until he's ready, right?
Merlin: This is the whole basis of the system.
Merlin: But what if there's a system inside the system?
Merlin: What if there's a wizarding world inside of the – what if there's an imam calling from inside the imam?
Merlin: And what if Gleep Glop – Gleep Glop?
Merlin: Gleep Glop is just the tip of the UFO iceberg.
John: He has to be, right?
John: Because somewhere – I mean, Gleep Glop's the one they dropped off.
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Right.
John: They don't drop off the captain.
John: He could be the Zeppo of his planet.
John: Exactly right.
John: They might have, frankly, they might have been like, we got to get Gleep Glop off of this ship.
John: Pull over.
John: Hang on.
Merlin: Don't take off yet.
Merlin: Gleep Glop's not here.
Merlin: And they're like, hmm.
Merlin: Zoom.
Zoom.
Merlin: Pull a Martian on him, right?
Merlin: Just leave him behind.
Merlin: Let him figure out how to grow stuff inside the spaceship.
Merlin: This is the thing about space, Mussolini.
Merlin: He makes the ships run on time.
Merlin: That's so true.
John: And if Gleep Drop's not back from butterfly collecting...
John: All of a sudden, he's 40 stories down under Area 51 running in the U.S.
Merlin: government.
Merlin: I was thinking dandelions.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Gleep Glop.
Merlin: Is he an eldritch figure?
Merlin: Do you think is he a terrifying old gods kind of otherworldly character, or is he kind of cute, do you think?
John: This is the thing about grays.
Merlin: Is he a gaseous form where they've got to put Groucho glasses on him to even think he has a face?
John: No, I think he's a gray because there's just too much evidence that the grays are real.
John: Everybody sees the same gray, except sometimes they're skinny and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they're cute and sometimes they're not.
John: Sometimes they appear underneath the bed and sometimes they don't.
John: Sometimes they come walking down a big platform.
Merlin: But there's a consistency.
Merlin: You could make a little kid's animation flip book out of your notebook with all random different pictures of Gleep Globs from history, and then it would pretty much look like a little cartoon.
Merlin: Sometimes they're very tall.
Merlin: They're usually narrow.
Merlin: They've got the big eyes.
Merlin: Big eyes.
John: Big heads.
John: Spindly bodies.
John: Sometimes they're holding hands.
John: Sounds kind of like Gwyneth Paltrow.
John: I don't think they have any home improvement blogs.
Merlin: They got a blog.
Merlin: They're going to tell you about different teas that you can get.
Merlin: It's not surprising to me that there's UFO cults.
Merlin: That actually makes a lot of sense.
John: It's the chemtrails cults that are the ones that make sense, Merlin.
John: Yeah.
John: I got called by a good friend the other day.
John: This guy I've known for years.
John: He called me a chemtrails denialist.
John: I hadn't even heard the term denialist.
John: I really liked it.
John: But he was like, you're a chemtrails denialist.
John: And I was like, you're a smart guy.
John: Are you telling me that you're a chemtrails affirmatist?
John: Yeah, right.
John: What's the upshot of that?
John: He was like, there's just too much evidence that they're chemming us.
John: And I said, there is zero evidence they're chemming us.
Merlin: It's a lot like Twitter.
John: This is the thing.
Merlin: It's a lot like Twitter.
Merlin: I mean, we're basically somebody keeps saying the same incorrect thing over and over.
Merlin: And eventually it seems true or at least plausible or at least reportable because the same ding-a-lings keep saying the same thing over and over.
Merlin: So now that's a story.
John: Like, for instance, that Twitter is worth $2 billion or whatever?
John: Is that what you're talking about?
John: What, does it make it a duocorn?
John: No, I think Twitter's worth more than that.
John: Isn't Twitter worth, like, $72 billion?
John: $72 billion.
John: I think that was the last valuation.
John: It seems like a high valuation, John.
John: Did you see what just happened to Amazon.com?
John: No, what happened to Amazon.com?
John: They came out with some earnings report that's just as fake as the old earnings report.
John: But all of a sudden, in one day, the value of the company jumped $35 billion.
Merlin: My friend has a theory about Amazon that I think is very interesting.
Merlin: Because, you know, they never have big profits.
Merlin: My friend has a theory that they – or, you know, just a funny guess – that Amazon comes up with whatever number they want to report for, I guess, profits –
Merlin: squared against the revenue, and they spend everything except that amount so that they have some amount that they can say that they made.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I'm not a statistician, but that makes a lot of sense to me.
Merlin: Like they got to show some money, but they don't want to show too much.
Merlin: They want to keep that steady trickle going, but they got to show something.
Merlin: Well, see, I'm not sure what being an esthetician has to do with it, but.
John: Is that why you pop people's zits in a spa?
John: Oh, you pop people's zits and they put it on the internet and people watch that shit.
John: Is that like ASMR?
John: It is.
John: People sit and watch zit popping videos for hours at a time.
John: I can see that.
John: I mean, I wouldn't actually see it, that's horrifying, but I can see why that would appeal to people.
John: And they say things like, I just had a really hard day at work, and I want to come home and just relax.
John: Watch some zits.
John: Watch some zit popping.
John: So this is the thing, if you go back, and I don't know why, but I've been saying here's the thing a lot more lately, and I feel like that was our original way of talking to each other, but then that guy from 30 Rock took it.
John: Now I can't even say it.
Merlin: I don't think he's heavily involved in that show.
Merlin: Oh, really?
John: He just shows up and reads the script?
Merlin: Well, you know, we should save that for another day.
Merlin: But I think there's a kind of podcast where somebody famous just sort of shows up.
Merlin: Sort of like you do.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, the Amazon earnings report feels to me exactly like the what if I went back in time but still had my smartphone.
John: daydream where you're like, look, if I start betting on penny stocks because I'm Googling through the time hole, I'm able to use Google and I'm able to say it's January 3rd of 1954.
John: What was the best performing penny stock?
John: You're Biff with the sports almanac.
John: You're Biff with the sports almanac.
John: Kind of, right?
John: But you don't want to give away the whole game, right?
John: If you're the stock guy that's never wrong.
John: Part of being a hustler is losing a lot at first.
John: That's right.
John: You got to lose.
John: And you got to periodically lose big so that everybody's like, well, he's not that smart.
John: But then little by little, you're actually winning big.
Merlin: Sort of the opposite of being a tech analyst where you guess a couple things right at first and then you're just wrong for 20 years.
Merlin: Yeah, or like Nate Silver.
Merlin: He's explained why he got things wrong when he got it wrong.
John: That's true.
Merlin: I don't believe that he's dishonest.
Merlin: It helps to know that his interest in this stuff started with playing lots of online poker.
John: If you start your career playing online poker, I'm going to trust you.
John: I'm going to trust you intrinsically.
John: Because you stopped.
John: And it's a gentleman's game.
John: That's true.
John: No dicks in that business.
John: So I feel like Amazon is doing exactly what you say, which is like we're making so much money home delivering toilet paper.
John: that we have to gin up some numbers to throw people off the scent to look like we're flopping.
John: Because one day we're going to... They're sandbagging.
John: They're sandbagging.
John: One day we're going to do an earnings report that's like a corrective where all of a sudden...
John: Our company is worth 35 billion more magic chits, magic earth monies.
John: Yes.
John: 35 billion of them more one day to account for the 20 years we've been telling you that we've been making no money.
John: uh delivering toilet paper or you know or or ruining the publishing business yeah so i mean i hate to start talking about amazon in this town because they're they're the de facto uh government here now if you walk around
John: and you see somebody with a topknot, and you say something bad about Amazon, there's as much chance that they're going to have you dragged into the bushes and shown not Gleep Glop, because they've never seen Gleep Glop either, but shown something.
John: What's going to happen is that all of a sudden,
John: When you go on Amazon, it's going to say, just because you like this dildo, here's a list of 40 dildos.
John: And you're like, I didn't like a dildo.
John: Why are you doing this to me?
John: Stop hitting yourself.
John: Exactly.
John: And you're trying to show your kid or your lady friend something that you want to get on Amazon for Christmas and on the side.
Merlin: It's all dildos.
John: It's just dildos all the way down.
John: Yeah.
John: And you're like, shit, no, no, no.
John: Why are you doing this?
John: And somebody at Amazon, some top-knotted Amazon's like...
Merlin: I'm surprised they even acknowledge you.
Merlin: How are things going with it?
Merlin: In fact, I don't want to derail you, but we still have a lot more to discuss about Hogwarts.
Merlin: By the way, today is the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts.
John: Oh, is that right?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: A lot of good people were lost that day.
John: Oh, it's May 2nd, so there won't be any riots in Seattle on May 2nd.
John: But what were you going to ask?
John: How are things going with the wet tea people?
Merlin: The wet tea.
Merlin: Oh, oh.
Merlin: Is there any, I guess I'm asking, is there any change?
Merlin: Have you had any breakthroughs?
John: So about a week ago, I got off the elevator and the entire hallway was filled with what appeared to be children.
John: And then as I got closer to them, I realized that they were, let's call them teens.
John: And then I was intermingled, then I was amongst them.
John: They're clogging the hallway, and in the style of teens, they have no awareness of anyone but themselves.
John: Yeah.
John: So they're not like, clear a path for this dinosaur who's strolling through our midst.
John: They're just like all milling around in the hallway, and I'm trying to wend.
John: Now I'm wending.
John: Oh.
John: And as I'm wending, I realize, oh, maybe these aren't teens.
John: Maybe I've become that person who no longer can distinguish.
Merlin: You can't tell.
Merlin: You can't tell now.
Merlin: As you get good at telling the age of somebody below 11, you get really bad at anybody who's between, let's say, 18 and 40.
Merlin: So I look at a kid.
John: You're absolutely right.
John: I look at a kid now and I'm like, you're four and three quarters, aren't you?
Merlin: I can.
Merlin: Yeah, you can.
Merlin: You're like somebody at a carnival.
Merlin: You know what age that kid is.
John: Yeah.
John: And but you're inhibited in saying to that child's parent, although you desperately want to show off this skill, your kid's four and three quarters, isn't it?
John: But you don't say that to the parent because if you are wrong, it is the kind of wrong you don't want to be.
John: If the kid is three and you're saying four and three quarters, there's an implication that your child is freakishly big.
John: I mean, you want to think that that's a compliment.
John: Like, oh, wow, your kid seems to be a year and a half older.
Merlin: In my experience, including just being me, I can find a way to turn anything into an insult.
John: Right.
John: You're like, is your kid four and three quarters?
John: And they're like, he's seven.
John: You're like, oh, shit.
John: I'm sorry.
John: He's really cute for his age.
John: He seems to be developing nicely for an undernourished homunculus.
John: But so I'm walking through this crowd.
John: I'm like, are these kids 24?
John: Are they 16?
John: I can't tell the difference.
John: They're here.
John: It seems like without a chaperone.
John: So I don't think they're 16.
John: But I don't know about modern teens.
John: Maybe they're all wandering around in groups of 40 now.
John: Well, they're like the Dutch.
John: They've all gotten so big.
John: Yeah, right.
John: But looking at their faces, I'm like, ah.
John: So they're here.
John: They're coming out of the tea place.
John: And they're milling around in my hallway.
John: And there's a part of me that wants to say, hey, wise up.
John: First of all, get out of my way.
John: Second of all, wise up.
John: Get smarter faster.
John: And then they all start to... No one says, okay, everybody.
John: Come on.
John: But they all start to move as a as a as a pack, all still chatting to one another.
John: But they're moving and they're moving in the same direction that I'm moving.
John: So I was wending.
Merlin: But they have they have.
Merlin: It sounds like it's hard to believe.
Merlin: I don't mean to interrupt you, but it's hard to believe they're from Seattle because it seems like one of the basic skills would be like making your way around a city and not running into people and getting out of people's way.
John: I have no idea where they're from.
John: That's the other thing.
John: They could be from Idaho.
John: They could be... No, they're not from Idaho.
John: I would recognize Idaho's.
John: But they could be from California.
John: They could be the advanced wave of a teen invasion.
John: And so I'm wending.
John: All of a sudden, they are moving.
John: Now we're moving in a pack.
John: I'm moving slightly faster.
John: So I'm moving through... Again, you're going to see, if you're looking at this from on high...
John: If you're a Gleep Klop looking into your monitor, you're going to see that I have a tempo that's different from the tempo of this slow-moving gas cloud.
John: But now I can't escape being in this group because they've expanded to take up the entire space.
John: Oh, they're like a gill net, like a moving net.
John: Yeah.
John: So I'm the halibut trying to get back to the mud.
John: And they are like, whoo.
John: And you're just I'm like traveling along at the same speed as the net trying to avoid either the front or the back of it.
John: Come on, guys, make a hole.
John: And then it's right.
John: Make a hole.
John: And then eventually they turn to go into the they turn to go down the stairs.
John: And I managed to wend in such a way that I don't touch anyone and get like oxy 10 on me.
John: Or Oxycontin on me.
John: And then I'm out.
John: But I'm like, what is going on in that tea place?
John: I really feel like...
John: I feel like it's not what it appears to be, and it's not even the secondary level of what it appears to be.
Merlin: See, whenever we recorded that episode a few weeks ago, my feeling was that some of our listeners said, oh, is it kombucha?
Merlin: There were people who had tea suggestions that made sense.
Merlin: I honestly thought that by this week, by this recording, it would have become clear that this was some kind of a normal and knowable thing.
John: Nope.
John: Not at all.
John: When I look in the door, there are bins and bins and bins upon bins.
John: Of wet tea.
John: I think within those bins there are teas and there are tea flavorings, there are tea additives.
John: Like when I look at pictures of tea growing in the wild in China and other places where tea grows, there's no Lapsang Sushan.
John: There's no Orange Pico.
John: Like there's just, it just appears to me to be tea or variations on tea.
John: And then you've got to be adding the orange, right?
John: And I'm not sure whether the orange is a mist or whether you throw some peels in there.
John: You're like, what makes the different kinds of tea different from one another?
John: I mean, sure, you're growing different varieties of tea.
John: But not enough.
Merlin: It's like back to your example of making beer.
Merlin: It isn't like you buy everything in beer except water and add water.
Merlin: That wouldn't be beer.
Merlin: There's no such thing as instant beer.
Merlin: And in this case, even to make instant tea, let alone wet tea or dry tea, you have to commingle many items in some kind of hygienic environment.
Merlin: You add in certain flowers that have been aged a certain way.
Merlin: It sounds very artful.
John: If you're making mint tea, if you're making raspberry, hibiscus tea, just by its very nature, it's right there in the name, you're going to at some point along the way have to have a bin of hibiscus.
John: And you're going to sprinkle some hibiscus in there.
John: I don't know why there's not mint hibiscus tea.
John: You could do a little bit of both.
John: Maybe that's what these people are doing.
John: And then they're adding water, and then they're selling wet tea to people.
Okay.
John: I want to go back, though, to instant beer.
John: Why is there no instant beer?
Merlin: So it seems like NASA probably has this, but they're hiding it with leap glop.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: I bet somewhere there's been some astronaut they really wanted to get up there, except, you know, a little bit of a drinker, right?
Merlin: Right, okay, okay.
John: They're like, this guy's got the science, but we have to entice him somehow.
Merlin: Okay, here's your space pen, here's your tang, and then just for you, these packets, when you add space water to it, it makes space beer.
Merlin: And the space beer guy... Why it hasn't been made?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It seems to me that could be something they make with your soda stream.
Merlin: All you need is carbonation plus beer parts.
Merlin: So shouldn't you be able to buy beer parts that already have all the performance characteristics and just add soda water to it?
John: So let me get this straight.
John: Within the space program, it's a specific set of skills.
John: Like, for instance, if you're going to go to Mars and you want a botanist...
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Or let's say, do you remember the movie Russia House?
John: I know the name.
John: Was that Michelle Pfeiffer?
John: Michelle Pfeiffer and Sean Connery.
John: And at one point, Roy Scheider is running a running an operation.
John: Roy Scheider is like the he's the sort of he's the high and tight top CIA guy.
John: Got it.
John: And then as every rendition of the CIA – and I'm sorry to use the word rendition – but every rendition of the CIA in film includes one very flamboyantly either gay or – Artistic.
John: Real eccentric –
Merlin: where you're like, what is this?
Merlin: This is like the guy from Community in The Martian.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He may not be a gay fella, but obviously he's very artistic.
John: Exactly.
John: And you say that you're always hearing about how hard it is to get into the CIA, and they do all these background checks on you, and they don't want there to be any kind of funny business.
John: But then in this film, there's this 65-year-old guy who used to work for the OSS, who is walking around like Rip Torn,
John: And you go, how does this make sense?
John: But then again, it perfectly makes sense.
John: So you're saying within the astronaut corps, there's someone like that, except he's more like Foster Brooks.
John: But he's got skills that we need in space.
Merlin: Yeah, I think he might be played today by Kurt Russell.
Merlin: Right, as kind of like a combination.
Merlin: Snake Plissken as a comic drunk meets some kind of a science boffin.
Merlin: A science boffin.
Merlin: Yeah, like he's a smarty pants, but he's got a reason to want to make space beer.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: To keep the bloodline going.
Merlin: It's a long trip.
Merlin: To allow there to be drunks in space.
John: Why is there... I feel like this is some kind of artisanal thing.
John: Something that we should... I don't think you and I have the power to set loose an army of top knots, but...
John: But there is an army of top knots.
Merlin: Oh, like death eaters.
Merlin: Well, here's the thing also.
Merlin: You think about the top knots.
Merlin: What's a top knot love?
Merlin: A top knot loves anything artisanal and small batch.
Merlin: What else do they love?
Merlin: They love hiking, right?
Merlin: They love going out and being able to hike.
Merlin: But the thing is, are you going to carry a couple half racks on top of your top knot?
Merlin: No, it's going to be hard.
Merlin: And you've got to take out what you bring in.
Merlin: What if we give you artisanal instant beer?
Merlin: So when you go on wherever you go, when you walk around in the Pacific Northwest,
Merlin: you could make instant beer that's not heavy nor environmentally impactful.
John: One thing a hiking topknot likes about hiking is they love to drink river water.
John: Right?
John: This is a thing that people don't know about topknot because in a lot of places... I never knew that.
Merlin: I feel like I'm getting an education right now.
John: Well, this is the Gleep Glop thing, right?
John: The Gleep Glop is not, he's not the head Gleep Glop.
John: He's just the butterfly collector.
John: The top knots that you're meeting out in the town
John: are are just the they're the uh they're the mike mills's of top-notch culture i get you the real ones i mean the stormtroopers right they're they're not the head guy they're not making it administrative executive decisions in the top-notch uh hierarchy those guys are high up high high up in the mountains drinking river water
Merlin: And ignoring each other.
John: They don't even give a nod.
John: And they don't give a nod.
John: And the thing, because they're all, I mean, they don't have to nod at each other, right?
John: They're like Eskimos.
John: They don't need to talk all winter.
John: They're a lot like cardinals.
John: But they're the cardinals of top knots.
John: Cardinals of top knots, yeah.
John: And they're up there and they don't get Giardia because they're putting instant beer in their river water.
Merlin: Instant beer.
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: So this is a little bit like you come over on the Mayflower, you bring some hardtack and Johnny cake and you got some casks full of beer.
Merlin: Even the kids are drinking beer because that doesn't have Giancarlo in it.
John: What's it called?
John: Right.
John: It doesn't have Giancarlo.
John: Right.
John: Giardia.
John: Yeah.
John: Which is also a brand of gluten free spaghetti.
John: But my suspicion is that it's like sourdough.
John: And I bet you, I swear to God, I bet you right now there are some top knots somewhere with making some kind of artisanal sourdough because sourdough was the original artisanal thing.
John: When I was a kid in the 70s, all the top knots of the day
John: We're talking about sourdough.
John: We're making sourdough this.
John: Had their own little pile of sourdough that was... Get your own starter.
John: It's all got Napoleon in it.
John: Yeah, their sourdough was rotting on the kitchen counter, just like every house you went to in Anchorage in 75 had a little pile of sourdough somewhere getting hot.
John: And I don't know.
John: I haven't heard about any of these sort of...
John: Olives and anchovies people also pursuing sourdough, but it's got to be next on the chain.
Merlin: If I'm hearing you correctly, not only is this a lot like the Roman Catholic Church or the Wizarding World via Hogwarts, it's also got a business model, but we can't see it.
Merlin: It's got a Gleep Glop business model.
Merlin: There's something much deeper than just a bunch of wet tea and an artist encaustic painting warehouse.
Merlin: You're saying this could go a lot.
Merlin: This is the Gleep Glop to Area 51.
Merlin: What I want to know...
Merlin: Like I had a tweet up the other day.
John: Oh, you did?
John: You were in San Francisco.
John: You had a tweet up.
John: I had a tweet up.
John: And just as a random sampling of our audience, although not completely random because my tweet up was in the lower hate in San Francisco.
John: So it's a random sampling of our audience that can get to the lower hate in San Francisco.
Merlin: Nate Silver went on control for that.
John: Right, right.
John: You can't say this is everybody, right?
John: Because I have had a tweet up in Kansas City, and there were a bunch of people that came to that, and they're not.
John: Well, but you know what?
John: There are a lot of similarities between those two groups.
John: If we were going to activate an army, you and I, if we were going to say, if we were going to Manchurian candidate some situation here, where like, army of Roderick on the Line listeners, rally to my flag.
John: To me, my X-Men.
John: We would be...
John: We would be set for life in terms of apps.
John: We would be able to develop any app we wanted.
Merlin: Really?
John: Yeah.
John: We would have hardware and software people across a variety of platforms.
John: Full-stack podcasting fan.
John: Yeah.
John: They do it all.
John: Stem to stern, soup to nuts.
John: We would be able to put apps on Android platforms.
John: We would be able to put apps on Microsoft phones.
John: Both of them.
John: We could do almost anything within the AppSphere.
John: Well, that's a lot of power, John.
John: But we couldn't activate a single topknot.
John: Oh, come on.
John: Now, I didn't see a single one.
John: Everybody had normal hair.
Merlin: Well, I think you've shamed the topknotts and the homebrewers.
Merlin: The homebrewers are very, very sad.
Merlin: Well, you know, the thing about this is... I want to reach out to them.
Merlin: I want to reach out to them.
John: I had this tweet up at the very...
John: brew pub that I was teasing in the famous brew pub episode.
John: So I tried to make it up to them.
John: I tried to correct the imbalance.
John: I tried to... Oh, you handed them a hops branch.
John: I tried to take my...
John: my teasing back and say, in fact, this is a lovely brew pub.
John: Let's all meet there.
John: I'm not sure how many of our listeners knew that they were in the titular brew pub.
Merlin: Oh, that is deep catalog.
Merlin: Only Nick's can go to China.
Merlin: Only Roderick could go to the brew pub.
John: He could go back to the brew pub and say, actually, isn't this a wonderful place?
John: And everyone had a lovely time.
John: Nice.
John: But what I'm wondering is, who are the Merlin Manns and John Rodericks of top-not culture?
John: Who are the people that could say, rally to my flag,
Merlin: oh i finally heard the lumineers i was at a wedding uh and i was in a car and they were listening to the lumineers now it's one of those things it's like uh donald hollister and the word baguettes baguettes what is it when you have a have a diamond remember on on that girl he hears a word for the first time and uh what's that called what's that syndrome called
Merlin: It's when you hear a word for the first time and you start hearing it everywhere.
Merlin: Oh, it's called the slug bug.
Merlin: Slug bug syndrome, where now it's Lumineers all the way down.
Merlin: I heard a song exploder on the Lumineers and how they write their songs and they stomp.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But do you think the Lumineers might be the Roderick on the line of Top Knotts?
John: No, because I feel like the Lumineers are the Gleep Klop of Top Knotts.
John: Okay.
John: Right.
John: Like they look like the leaders, but they're not.
John: They're the butterflies.
John: Oh, I get it.
John: Right.
John: And you want to go back and you want to say, are Mumford and Sons the leaders?
John: No, I don't think so.
John: Although they might be the Chanteuses.
John: Okay.
John: Okay.
John: There's somebody up the chain.
John: Who is making the connections between brass fittings, between leather work, like wallets that are kind of unusable but pretty.
John: Like if you go into a store and you're like, that's a pretty wallet.
John: And then you pick it up and you're like, am I going to put this in my pocket?
John: Not really.
John: Okay.
John: Pocket books and stuff where it's like nobody uses pocket books.
Okay.
John: But they're getting made and artisanal beer and big trays of food where it's all covered with leeks.
John: Butcher classes?
John: Butcher classes.
John: Are fixed gear bikes still a thing?
John: Absolutely.
John: Fixies are on there.
John: Okay.
John: Mustache waxes and all the body waxes.
John: Beard oil.
John: Except for the vagina waxes.
John: No.
John: This is the thing.
John: Although this is what I don't know.
Merlin: Are there artisanal vagina waxes?
Merlin: I would have to think that there are.
Merlin: It's going to be locally sourced products.
Merlin: It might not even be wax.
Merlin: It might be instead of bees, wax.
Merlin: It could be like bee urine.
Merlin: It could be something that's good for everybody.
Merlin: It's like spider sugar, right?
Merlin: It's good for everybody.
Merlin: And you could go in.
Merlin: But see, I don't know.
Merlin: Now, is it politically incorrect to get a wax if you're an artist saying a lady?
Merlin: Oh, see, I don't know about that either.
Merlin: And if you want to get your butthole bleached, they probably don't use bleach.
Merlin: They probably have something else.
Merlin: Again, something green.
Merlin: It might not be bleach.
Merlin: It might be like... It's bee urine.
Merlin: You already said it.
Merlin: It could be bee urine or Mrs. Myers or something.
John: No, I think that from my understanding, everyone, even the top knots now, their minds are so completely polluted by porn that no one can even see a pubic hair anymore.
John: One single pubic hair and it's just like a vomitorium.
Merlin: Yeah, so it's like a scarlet letter, but near your lady hole.
John: Unless you make it all the way through to the other side where you're like, no, I'm cultivating my body hair.
John: So it's on the other side of the hole?
John: I think it's on the other side of the hole, right?
John: Because you're trying to cultivate everything.
John: If you're taking butcher classes, you're almost surely... Oh, you're people eat every part of the buffalo.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: I'm sure you've got a bush like if you go to Home Depot and you walk down the steel wool aisle.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Are you flopping your flippers?
Merlin: I'm flipping my flipper because now I'm thinking of the last episode of season five of Game of Thrones and I'm thinking of that blonde lady having to walk naked down the aisles at Home Depot while people throw things at her.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Whore!
Merlin: Whore!
Merlin: A poor blonde lady.
John: A poor blonde lady.
John: Spoiler alert.
John: She had a body double for that.
John: Oh, well, of course.
John: You know, Game of Thrones has more superfluous breasts than
John: than the movie Airplane.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
John: That's good.
John: Now, there's your control group.
John: Finally, a control group.
John: I meant gratuitous rather than superfluous, but both gratuitous and superfluous.
John: Although you can't really say a breast is superfluous.
Merlin: Well, unless it's like a fifth one.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, if you got like four, that's plenty.
Merlin: Two's normal.
Merlin: Three's kind of an oddity.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Four, you got Remulus and Romulus.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You can raise Roman twins.
Merlin: Remulus and Romulan.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But five, that could be superb.
Merlin: Or it could be, you know what?
Merlin: It could be vestigial.
Merlin: I feel like the fifth one's for the runt.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: You ever know anybody with a vestigial tail?
Merlin: I've known people with a sixth toe.
Merlin: Yeah, that's pretty common, especially in Ohio.
Merlin: I've known people who have a little bit of a tail.
Merlin: I've never seen it, but I've heard about it.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah, you can get a little bit of a tail.
Merlin: It's like your spine keeps going out and it makes a little bit of a tail.
John: What does that look like in jeans?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I think you'd probably have to do a Princess Leia on and kind of bind it down.
John: It's a thing like in gay culture where you'd put a brown handkerchief in your left pocket.
John: Yeah, you'd put a little flag on it.
John: You could make a little hole in your jeans for it.
John: If you're walking along and you're looking at somebody's butt and then all of a sudden right above the butt middle part, the butt cleft.
John: Yes, the butt middle part.
John: Let's call it the cleft.
John: Then there's a little thing wiggling in there.
John: I think you're going to differentiate yourself in a busy bar.
Merlin: Are you going to say, is that Lemmy Winks?
Merlin: Or is that a vestigial tail?
Merlin: Think about how a monkey or a cat uses their tail.
Merlin: It's for balance.
Merlin: You could be probably one of the most balanced people in the bar, even with a very modest tail.
John: I'm so desperate to be one of the most balanced people in the bar.
Merlin: Join the club.
Merlin: Battle of Hogwarts.
Merlin: Picking a doctor.
John: Picking a doctor.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: What's going to happen to us?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You know, I got a lot of problems with online reviews in general.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And so I still find myself having to consult them.
Merlin: If it's a place I don't know anything about, here's my choices.
Merlin: I can go to their crappy website with all the things that they claim about themselves.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I can go to the dumpster fire that is Yelp.
Merlin: Ugh.
Merlin: But, like, I'm trying to figure out if there's a way.
Merlin: And, like, so back to your thing with the doctor, though.
Merlin: Like, I've done that before.
Merlin: You get a big book.
Merlin: It's almost like the voter, like the book you get in October for the election.
Merlin: And you're like, do I really have to read all of this?
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Except you got to pick a doctor.
Merlin: So what do you do?
Merlin: How do you pick a doctor out of that book?
Merlin: Well, you could go, well, we've got cancer in the family, so I should look for somebody who's good at oncology.
Merlin: But mostly it's like, as we used to call it, a Facebook.
Merlin: You're going to go through there and look at the pictures and the names and see who suits you.
Merlin: Do you know what I'm saying?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, how do you pick out of a directory like that?
John: So I was somehow through an Internet wormhole.
Yeah.
John: I ended up back in Anchorage, Alaska on the Internet now.
John: And this is a thing that I seldom do, right?
John: You don't look at Anchorage through the Internet, partly because the Internet is insufficient to describe Anchorage.
John: Anchorage was late adopter of the internet, just as it was a late adopter of everything.
John: Like a cold brigadoon.
John: Like a cold brigadoon.
John: So I'm on the internet.
John: I'm looking at, I followed a monkey path.
John: Yep.
John: To a picture of a hotel, an abandoned hotel on Northern Lights Boulevard that was once the Ramada Inn was once called the Northern Lights Hotel.
John: It is a hotel that I remember quite well.
John: It's the hotel in which I saw the first episode of Buck Rogers in the 21st century.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Bitty, bitty, bitty.
John: Yeah, back in 1980 or whatever.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: 79, 80, yeah.
John: When I started to reflect on... You can remember the room where you discovered Aaron Gray.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: Oh, brother.
John: And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, now, wait a minute.
John: I lived in this town.
John: Why was I in a room in the Ramada Inn watching Buck Rogers in the 21st century?
John: And then I remembered my dad had some... And I remember these little moments all the time now.
John: He had some meeting...
John: That he had to go to at this Ramada Inn and got a room in which he parked me in front of the television, in front of Buck Rogers in the 21st Century, while he had his meeting.
John: You were by yourself in a hotel room at the age of 10?
Merlin: 10 or 12.
Merlin: Whoa.
John: Watching.
John: I was 12.
John: You were probably like 10 or 11.
John: Well, and this used to happen to me all the time.
John: I was in hotel rooms my whole life by myself.
John: You and your sister.
John: You'd find things to throw.
John: I'd find things to throw out the window.
John: Light paper airplanes on fire and throw ice out the window until somebody down on the sidewalk went in and said, there's some kids upstairs throwing ice cubes out the window.
John: And then there'd be a knock on the hotel room door and we would be like, shh.
John: And we'd duck under the bed until the knocking went away.
John: But so I was I'm very comfortable in a hotel room by myself, even at even when I was seven years old, because my dad always had these mysterious meetings.
John: And I'm wondering whether he I think he was just having affairs.
John: I think he was meeting some woman in the in the hotel bar.
John: And he was like, I'm going to, you know, a hotel room at the time was probably 30 bucks.
John: It's like, I'm just going to put $30 to put the kid in them.
John: That's pretty smart.
John: Right.
John: Put him up in the hotel room, turn on the television.
John: He's not going anywhere.
Merlin: What could be better?
John: What could be better?
Merlin: What could be better?
Merlin: I mean, what are you going to do?
Merlin: Oh, I would really rather go somewhere and find homework.
Merlin: You're going to sit.
Merlin: You're going to be in a hotel room watching TV.
Merlin: There's no reason for you to want to leave.
Merlin: Your dad could be going and have his quote-unquote meeting on the next floor.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah, everything's good.
John: It could be in the next room as far as I know.
John: But, you know, in a hotel room, what do you do?
John: You go out of the room.
John: You go down to the ice machine.
John: This is before key cards.
John: So you just leave the door unlocked.
Merlin: You get those keys where the key chain is like a big diamond.
John: Oh.
John: Remember those?
John: I still have a couple of those.
John: I have one from the Fantasy Inn in...
John: Outside of Miami, a motel room that had plastic on the sheets, and when you turn on the television, it only has porn on the channels.
John: I was like, what am I doing here?
John: Oh, of course.
John: It's called the Fantasy Inn.
John: What was I thinking?
John: Oh, dear.
John: I was just looking for a room.
John: I was just looking for a $50 motel room, and I'm in someplace called the Fantasy Inn with plastic on the bed.
John: So I kept the key.
John: This is for a kayak.
John: I was so furious.
John: I was like, I'm keeping this key because at least the key is worth $50.
John: It's actually hanging on the wall in my bathroom.
John: Nice.
John: So I'm looking at the former Northern Lights Inn on the internet, and I'm like – and the Northern Lights Inn was right across the street from –
John: The what I think was called the chef or the it's called the chef or the chef's in, which was a place.
John: This is a this is a place.
John: This was a steak restaurant where you walked in.
John: The center of the restaurant was a giant piano that you could eat on.
John: There was a piano bar guy that was sitting there tinkling the ivories.
John: Wow.
John: But then the piano was made into a giant table.
John: So you sit around the piano, a piano shaped.
John: It wasn't just a piano bar.
Merlin: It was like a piano bistro.
John: The piano was the bar.
John: And you would pick your steak.
John: There were like raw steaks.
John: on a big platter, and you'd pick your steak, and then the guy in the chef's hat would take the raw steak that you put your finger on, and he'd put it on the broiler and cook it right in front of you.
John: No kidding.
John: This is called the chef's in, or the...
John: It was one of my dad's favorite restaurants.
John: We went there all the time.
John: I would never stop going there.
John: My goodness.
John: The guy sat and played the piano.
John: You sat on the piano bar eating your basically burned on the outside, red on the inside steak.
John: Pittsburgh, right?
John: He loved it.
John: He loved this place.
John: We went there all the time.
John: Oh, and the other thing they served was like a quarter of a head of lettuce with blue cheese on it.
John: Oh, I love a wedge salad.
John: This is all there was in this place.
John: And somebody's sitting there playing Arthur's theme and you're just hanging out and eating.
John: He's like, sing us the song.
John: Except it wasn't garbage.
John: He was playing jazz.
John: It was jazz music.
John: This sounds like heaven.
John: So the Northern Lights Inn was right across the street from the Chef's Inn or whatever this place was called.
John: God, how can I not remember the name of this restaurant?
John: We went all the time.
John: Anyway, I'm looking at it.
John: I'm like, oh, God, this is awful that this place is closed.
John: And so I start looking at, I don't know whether it was Yelp or some Anchorage blog.
John: And they said, oh, that hotel really went downhill when Mike Cusack owned it.
John: And I'm like, Mike Cusack?
John: Mike Cusack lived five doors down from me when I was growing up.
John: What?
John: He was the dermatologist who had his own Zamboni.
Merlin: He's a dermatologist turned hotelier.
Merlin: who once owned a Zamboni.
Merlin: So we lived on a lake, and when the lake would freeze... Everybody's obituary is going to be so much better than mine.
John: Mike Cusack would build a hockey rink on the lake.
John: He had hockey rink walls and lights on poles.
Merlin: And he would build this hockey rink on a public lake where we all live.
Merlin: Don't you dare fucking call yourself an entrepreneur until you've done what Mike has done.
Merlin: Mike the dermatologist built his own hockey rink on the lake.
John: And then he had a fucking mini Zamboni that he would drive around his own hockey rink on a public lake.
John: With a generator running lights.
Merlin: That's insane.
Merlin: Don't you admire that?
John: Well, it was, I mean, compared to, like, even Elon Musk isn't so flamboyant.
John: You know, like this this guy and the thing is, all of his daughters were cheerleaders who wore a lot of blue eye shadow.
John: Sure.
John: And his son.
John: So then I start doing some research on like the Cusacks.
John: Right.
John: They were my they were kind of they weren't my nemeses.
John: I liked them just fine.
John: I went to a party at the Cusacks house where Mike Cusack himself arrived at the party.
John: and personally ejected me alone.
John: Oh, boy.
John: Because everyone else at the party was beautiful, and I was not beautiful.
John: You got bounced.
John: But I was also drunk and obnoxious, and I think I was knocking vases over.
John: And he was like, you, out.
John: And then everybody, it was like one of those parties in 16 Candles, or Pretty in Pink or whatever, where everybody else was beautiful and had a mullet.
John: And I was wearing a trench coat, and he was like,
John: You're the John Bender of this party.
John: Hit the bricks.
John: Yeah.
John: Anyway, I realized that the hotel had been run into the ground by Mike Cusack Jr., who was only a few years older than me.
Oh, my.
John: So then I'm online and I'm like Googling Mike Cusack, dermatologist, and I discover that Bristol Palin worked slash works at Mike Cusack's dermatology office.
John: What?
John: Which makes perfect sense if you know Alaska.
John: So Bristol Palin.
John: It's all very local.
John: You can see Russia from there.
John: That's right.
John: Bristol Palin, supposedly, is working for Mike Cusack.
John: But then there's all these shit-talking blogs where they're like, Bristol doesn't even work there.
John: It's like a front.
John: And if you call there and ask for Bristol, they tell you that she works at Dr. Jack Mioff's office.
John: Dr. Mioff, yeah.
John: Dr. Mioff.
John: Dr. Jack Mioff.
John: It's a family name.
John: So now I'm fascinated because I know these people.
John: Now you're really down the monkey trail.
John: And then, so I go on Yelp, Dr. Mike Cusack, two stars.
John: Oh.
John: which means one five-star review where the person wrote a whole paragraph like, Mike Cusack is amazing.
John: He's the greatest dermatologist that ever lived.
John: He's a wonderful man, and going there is a great pleasure.
John: And then 41-star reviews of people saying, he cut the tip of my nose off.
John: He spent the entire time where he was consulting me with headphones on, listening to Sammy Hagar's Red Rocker, period.
John: Just terrible, terrible reviews.
John: And and so I'm trying to use Google to find one thing about Mike Cusack basically that I didn't already know.
John: And other than this, other than like 40 websites that all give him a two star review and this story about them running the hotel into the ground.
John: Ah, that's the extent of what I could find online, except I knew one other thing, which was that they tried to make a reality show.
John: Of the Cusack girls who were like, oh, because Mike Cusack also owned the King Salmon Lodge, which was like a different kind of hotel where you go down and fish and hunt.
John: And this reality show was these girls who were very beautiful and very beautiful.
John: you know, they were, they were like made up, right?
John: It's like an Alaska version of Petticoat Junction.
John: Yeah.
John: They had, they had big hair.
John: They had, they had lots of eye shadow on.
John: They were like, by Alaska standards, they were the most beautiful girls.
John: Was it called the, the, the Alaska eights?
John: It was something like that where they were, where the premise was that these girls who looked sort of like, uh, Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders also had hunting and fishing skills aplenty.
John: Okay, okay.
John: So they were out in their Leboutin shoes.
Merlin: So it's kind of like, it's like the Kardashians, but for the Sarah Palin satchelor.
John: Yeah, exactly, right?
John: They were Sarah Palins in a way, like they were foxy.
John: Yeah.
John: And they could also clean and dress a deer.
John: And so I actually saw an episode of this.
John: It never, I don't ever think it got picked up, but they made an episode and somebody that I went to high school was like, you got to see this and sent me it.
John: I don't even know how they got it, but they were like, you got to see this.
John: And it's all these people that I know from that lived on my block and
John: Uh, I went to junior high with them.
John: I was even in a class with Mike Cusack.
John: He was a senior and I was a sophomore or something, but, but, uh, I'm watching this show and I'm like, this is incredible.
John: I don't know why this didn't get picked up.
John: This is so much better.
John: This is the, this is the housewives of Anchorage, Alaska, the housewives of King Sam in Alaska.
John: Uh, but it didn't, I don't think that ever took root.
Uh,
John: I mean, that's a fascinating clan.
John: And like you say, when the obituary is written.
John: Yep.
John: What's the lead on that one?
John: In Anchorage, I don't think you get a top-of-the-fold obituary unless you were shot at by somebody who was trying to steal your business or unless you had your own Zamboni.
Merlin: I Googled Mini Zambonis, and boy, I don't have any reason to have one, but boy, that sure would be fun.
Merlin: Send me a link.
Merlin: Send me a link to Mini Zamboni.
John: That's not a thing I ever would have thought to Google.
John: I mean, who would?
John: I sit and look at ocean-going tugboats all the time on Google, but I wouldn't have thought Mini Zamboni.
Merlin: Well, a lot of these are jokey, so you got like Lego.
Merlin: But I mean, you can buy a small Zamboni, I think.
Merlin: Yeah, or a Zamboni kit for your tractor.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And there's a lot of sort of homemade ones here.
Merlin: Some of them are like they're like a cross between like a rascal and like a VW Beetle.
John: Is it a VW?
John: Could you let me put it this way.
John: Could you put a Rolls Royce grill on a mini Zamboni?
Yeah.
John: I love that look.
John: Those kit cars people used to do.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Why doesn't anybody?
John: That's a thing that a hipster should have.
John: Whatever happened to those?
John: They used to be on the road everywhere.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: For like $800, you could make your VW Bug kind of look like a Rolls Royce.
John: Yeah, that is such a fabulous Furry Freak Brothers move, right?
John: What kind of car would Fat Freddy drive around in if not a Volkswagen Bug with a Rolls Royce grill?
Mm-hmm.
John: You know, there was a reason Fat Freddy's cat hung out with Fat Freddy.
John: And it wasn't, well, it was because Fat Freddy fed him, but also because Fat Freddy had a little class.
Merlin: Am I now off into some... You're a little bit out of my depth on the Fabulous Freak Brothers, but did you ever have any resolution on getting your charms blessed in Dubai?
Merlin: Not Dubai, Abu Dhabi?
John: I didn't have the chutzpah to walk up to an imam and say, will you like rub my talisman?
John: Because I didn't want to offend.
John: It seems like tourism a little bit.
John: Well, yeah, but it all would be for me, right?
John: I mean, I would like to collect a charm bracelet where every charm had been rubbed by a top shelf leader and
Merlin: of a different religious... A cardinal level leader in that group.
John: Right.
John: So let's say a Greek Orthodox patriarch, like a Lubavitcher rabbi, a cardinal, a... What about a chemtrail person?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: That's probably a pretty flat organization.
John: I feel like the top, the top activators of chemtrail stuff are like talk radio hosts.
John: There's, there's nobody, there's nobody higher up the chain than, than one of those guys in, from like Winnemucca, Nevada, who run a, who run like a talk radio empire.
John: That where, if they're not talking about mud people, they're talking about, they're talking about chemtrails.
Merlin: But you're also – you're decreasing your risk in terms of spiritual investment.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: You're diversifying your charm portfolio.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Well, and it's not a thing that I would wear.
John: I'm not going to wear a charm bracelet, but I'm talking about giving these things to my daughter to ward off evil spirits.
John: Like everybody who goes to Turkey comes back with one of those ward off evil eye like sun –
John: Sun talismans that hangs in your window on a sunny day.
John: Okay.
John: Okay.
John: You know, the, the ward off evil eye things.
John: No, I'll find it though.
John: Well, they're, you know, they're like a blue, like a single blue eyeball.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Look at that.
John: Yeah.
John: And you bring, people bring those back from Turkey because that's what Turkey is trying to sell you.
John: You get there and you're walking around and you're like, I want a souvenir from Turkey.
John: It's like coming back from Hawaii with a lei?
John: It's like coming back from, but the thing is a lei will die whereas an evil eye warder offer never will.
John: Okay.
John: But like you could come back with like a miniature, like a snow globe with the mosque from Edirne in it.
John: But you're not going to do that.
John: You're going to come back with one of these evil eye charms.
John: Because I don't know where, they might be selling them in the airport.
John: I never went to the airport there.
John: Oh, no, that's not true.
John: I've been to the Istanbul airport.
John: I don't remember whether they sold evil eye charms.
John: But you put one of those on a charm bracelet that you give your kid, and you're just... I think you don't even tell them what it's for.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: You just say, here's some pretty things, and they wear it, and you're hedging your bets.
Merlin: And if their life goes better, you know, hakuna matata.
Merlin: Hakuna matata.
Merlin: You get them a hakuna matata badge.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Mazel tov.
Merlin: Kim Kardashian wearing an evil eye.
Merlin: Is she?
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, she's had it all.
Merlin: Do you ever think you'll get into a phase where you wear a lot of turquoise jewelry?
Merlin: That seems to be a thing still.
Merlin: Like, not as much.
Merlin: Not as much as it used to be.
Merlin: But, you know, like those old couples holding hands, you get a guy with long hair and a beard and a lady with long hair and a beard, and they're frequently both wearing turquoise jewelry.
John: I always admired people that wore bootcut jeans and turquoise jewelry.
John: But I think you have to have slim hips.
John: I think that's a slim hip thing.
John: Oh, I got childbearing hips.
John: That's not going to happen.
John: Yeah, you're not going to wear turquoise jewelry if you don't have slim hips.
John: That's a thing for guys with a large mustache area.
John: That's true.
John: That's true.
John: For a while there, if you go to Northern Italy, let's say, let's say you're walking across the Ponte Vecchio.
John: Sure.
John: And you say, there's a lot of jewelry stores here.
John: People have got to be coming here for a reason.
John: Let's take a look.
John: There's a kind of ring that's
John: Called, I don't know what it is, a friendship ring or a, I don't think it's about friendship.
John: I think it's about, I think it's about command and control, but it's three gold rings of different kinds of gold, pink gold, yellow gold.
John: Green gold, blue gold, I don't know.
John: And it's like a luck cocktail?
John: Well, in order to get the ring on or off your finger, it's built in such a way that the rings have to kind of roll over each other.
John: Okay.
John: They really are three separate rings.
John: Three separate rings that are like intertwined.
John: They're like almost woven together.
John: And as you put them on your finger, the rings sort of roll on.
Okay.
John: And it was explained to me, I guess, that if you then coated the ring with wax or something that you couldn't get the ring off because it has to roll.
John: I get it.
John: I get it.
John: And so it was some kind of like our love is bounded or maybe all of that is baloney and it's just a pretty ring.
John: But when I was there...
John: uh, uh, the first time in Italy, I was like, I really want one of those.
John: That's very exotic because I think I was on a train with somebody.
John: I was thinking I was on a train with some Lebanese guy and he was like, check out my ring or I saw the ring and I was like, what is that ring?
John: And he's showing it to me and I'm like, wow, I've got to get one of those.
John: And then I'm in Florence and I'm like, that's where you get it.
John: But then of course it's made out of gold.
John: And I had
John: like 11 Fennings and couldn't afford this thing because they were expensive even then.
John: But I saw a silver one.
John: And so I bought the silver one.
John: And I was walking around for a long time thinking, I'm going to be the silver jewelry guy.
Merlin: Oh, I like that.
Merlin: I like that.
Merlin: It's not presumptuous.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's not turquoise.
John: You're not trying to say that you've been through a vision ceremony of any kind.
John: You're never going to live in Taos.
Merlin: And it's not too on the nose.
Merlin: It's not like you're the guy who collects elephants.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, right, right.
John: Silver jewelry, that's a big tent hobby.
John: It's a big tent hobby, and you can have big silver jewelry, you can have small silver jewelry, you can have, I mean, not like I'm ever going to wear a pinky ring, or even a ring on my first finger, which is the ultimate symbol of do not do.
God.
John: ring on your fucking pointer finger.
Merlin: I wish I could unjudge the people with all the rings.
Merlin: I wish I could make myself not see the rings and not have an opinion about it.
John: So I had this little three ring friendship ring on one of my fingers and then I had I tried to do some second I went second level of jewelry.
John: I think a girl gave me an onyx
John: On a silver chain.
John: Oof.
John: Like a crystal.
John: And it was meant to channel my black bile or something.
John: I don't know what it was meant to do.
John: But a black onyx.
Merlin: Is that like buying somebody a mop?
John: Is that one of those things where you're kind of.
John: I think so.
John: I think that's exactly what it was.
John: She was like, you have too much chi.
Yeah.
John: And you need to wean.
John: You need to vent your black chi.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: You need to cleave some black chi.
John: And here's the thing.
John: You don't know what it does.
John: Don't worry about it.
John: It's a talisman that's been blessed by the cardinal of crystals.
John: And put it on and you'll be fine.
John: So I'm wearing this black onyx.
John: and i've got my friendship ring and then of course my silver friendship ring and then of course like 15 uh 15 friendship bracelets that people had tied on my wrist because we were friends apparently while you slept i think so they you know they dosed my kombucha and then i woke up and i'm covered with all these prayer flags
John: And I was walking around like that for a long time.
John: I had a soul patch.
John: And when you put it all together.
John: Aren't you a fan of puka shells, too?
John: Oh, puka shells, right.
John: I had all of that going on.
Merlin: I never had a mullet because I thought, whoa, bridge too far.
Merlin: You're six weeks away from being the turquoise guy.
Merlin: You're so close.
Merlin: I think I was.
Merlin: I'm walking around.
Merlin: What about Marlon Brando?
Merlin: Was Marlon Brando a turquoise guy?
No.
Merlin: I'll bet he was.
John: Maybe.
John: I could see.
John: I mean, Marlon Brando was one of those, like, who knows what's going on with him?
John: Like, maybe he had a. He felt thought.
John: He felt feelings very deeply.
John: He could have been walking around with a turquoise butt plug in all the time.
John: And the rest of us didn't know.
John: But it's like it's like it's Cleve and his G.
Merlin: What I want.
Merlin: Marlon Brando Turquoise.