Ep. 205: "Space Clarinets"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Good.
John: I really like your new avatar, your Skype avatar.
John: Oh, thank you.
John: Of Dr. Head or whatever, Dr. Scarface.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I'm trying a new thing where I change things periodically.
Merlin: Oh, whoa.
Merlin: Have you just recently changed your passwords?
Merlin: Couldn't say.
Merlin: I'm always changing my passwords.
John: When you have a new password, do you make it so that it's something that you can type quickly, or is it something that you have to kind of spider type, like, ah.
Merlin: Ah, spider typing.
Merlin: Are you actually asking?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I would never choose a password that I can remember.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: And I use a little computer program that remembers my passwords for me.
Ah.
Merlin: How do you remember the computer program?
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Who blue penis is the blue penis man?
John: Right.
John: I mean, I mean, I mean, whoa.
John: Passwords all the way down.
John: I mean, whoa.
John: So you just have the password to the computer machine.
John: Yes.
John: And it has the passwords to everything.
Merlin: I have a password to the computer machine, and then my password program has a passphrase, which is a long sentence.
Merlin: And I type that in, and then that lets me get to individual passwords.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: You have a passphrase.
Merlin: I have a passphrase.
Merlin: You have a passphrase, which is like ipset delorum.
Merlin: Ipset delorum, consecutive misrani.
Merlin: Misrani.
Merlin: And it's something that only you could know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Maybe.
Merlin: I don't want to talk about it.
Merlin: Send me some photos of your keys.
John: It's not what Mr. Fennell did.
John: Everybody knew what Mr. Fennell did.
Merlin: See, that's the thing.
Merlin: It wouldn't work.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Everybody knows it.
Merlin: That's my passphrase.
Merlin: He came prodigiously in his shorts.
Merlin: But I changed all the O's to zeroes because I'm leet.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: You learned about that on 4chan, right?
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: I'm not a noob.
Merlin: Am I right?
Merlin: Am I right?
Merlin: This is terrific.
Merlin: Can you do radical ollies?
John: Totally.
John: I'd do inverted Mobius.
Merlin: Oh, is that right?
John: It's my trick move, inverted Mobius.
Merlin: If you start an inverted Mobius, are you allowed to finish it?
Merlin: Does it just keep turning around in your hand?
Merlin: I think you finish it when you land.
Merlin: It doesn't matter where you are on the loop.
Merlin: I don't know exactly why or when this started, but for some reason, maybe starting a few months ago, whenever I'd see some kid walking around the neighborhood vaping, I would say, first, just in my head, I'd go, sick vape, bro.
Merlin: And then, increasingly, I would kind of say it under my breath.
Merlin: I'd go, sick vape, bro.
Merlin: Something happened in the last couple weeks, and I don't even realize I'm doing it.
Merlin: I just go, sick vape, bro.
Merlin: Which, now... Making friends?
Merlin: Well, now I'm doing it for skateboarding tricks, and it feels pretty good.
Merlin: Are you saying sick vape, bro, to people for their skateboard tricks?
Merlin: They don't land the trick.
Oh.
Merlin: And it feels it feels so good and it feels so right because there's this, you know, you see those people that they look a little bit.
Merlin: You can't tell if they're tribal or merely live in a car.
Merlin: And it's it's a it's a guy who could be 16 or he could be 60.
Merlin: And he keeps riding his skateboard and trying to jump over the bike rack, and he keeps making a big noise and falling down and doing it over.
Merlin: Now, first of all, I want to say to this young or old man, you know, Hakuna Matata, I admire your persistence for feeling the need to ride a children's toy over a bike rack.
Merlin: Stick with that.
Merlin: You're going to get a lot of letters.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: It's hard.
John: When I think of a vapor...
John: I think of your friend Scott Simpson.
Merlin: He's not really a vapor, though.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: See, we talked about this.
Merlin: What's the dividing line between one who vapes and a vapor?
Merlin: I think it's one thing to have an Ethernet wizard cigarette, and it's quite another thing to have that little R2-D2 dildo.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I see what you're saying.
Merlin: You wonder, like, this is probably what futurists from the 40s thought it would look like if you had polio or asthma.
Merlin: In 2016, this is what you would use.
Merlin: I will take a minuscule amount of my space medicine.
Merlin: Is it a, yeah, is it a vaporous?
John: Benny Goodman cigarette?
John: Yeah, like a space clarinet.
Merlin: I don't know why.
Merlin: I don't know why I think it's quite so funny as I do, except that it's one of those things where, you know, like any kind of old person, you see something that perfectly encapsulates the silliness of a certain generation, regardless of whether the individual people are or are not Rhodes scholars and good people.
Merlin: There's something that just encapsulates like what we're going to laugh about.
Merlin: And so you see this in something like...
Merlin: When you first see a movie that sends up a trend that's 15 to 20 years old.
Merlin: So you show a movie that's ostensibly about the late 80s and there's got to be some kid with a tall fade.
Merlin: And there's going to be some people in neon clothing.
Merlin: There's these kinds of things that immediately jump out to you as, oh, my God, that's right.
Merlin: Salt and pepper hat.
Merlin: Yeah, but there's that thing that jumps out at you that it takes 15 years to really sink in for most normal people.
Merlin: We go, oh, my God, that's so weird that we all did that and that seemed normal for a while.
John: Yeah, well, think about, like, at the time, River Phoenix hair seemed like it was like a fad, right?
John: You'll see it mocked in that kind of air of, like, long, wispy bangs across your face.
Merlin: Look, every Filipino kid got it.
Merlin: You're talking about the Leonardo DiCaprio Titanic hair, right?
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: And I think of it as River Phoenix hair.
Merlin: Sure, I think he was there first.
Merlin: I think he was the John the Baptist to that movie.
Merlin: Oh, for shizzle, but...
John: But River Phoenix hair, turns out, is a perennial style.
John: We're always going to have River Phoenix hair.
John: I think it's kind of cool, actually.
John: If I was out doing ollies, I would have River Phoenix hair.
John: In fact, I've had it.
John: I've had it many times.
John: But do you remember, and you may not, because you might have been sequestered somewhere in Florida wearing army jackets and having a mustache.
Merlin: Sequestration is one of the primary performance characteristics of Florida.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Precisely.
John: I mean, because you're all preparing for the super wave.
Merlin: Yeah, the EMP, the Jesus, losing sports.
Merlin: Losing sports.
Merlin: The entire state.
Merlin: That was a great Keanu Reeves movie from 1991.
Merlin: Remember that?
Merlin: Losing sports.
Merlin: Losing sports.
Merlin: That's actually the brand of my underwear.
John: Is that the one that has the silver in it?
John: You got silver in it?
John: No, that's different.
John: The silver underwear is different.
John: Is that your ARFID protecting underwear?
Merlin: It's like a Faraday cage.
Merlin: Oh, nice.
Merlin: It's a Faraday cage for your business.
John: Yeah, it keeps the electromagnetic pulse out of my junk.
Merlin: That's nice.
Merlin: I was on the EFF site a day and a half ago, and I was buying some EFF items, and I saw that they have several ARFID-protecting things you can get.
Merlin: You can get an ARFID protector for your passport.
Merlin: You can get one for your wallet.
John: Is the EFF site the one that listens to the signals radio station from Russia?
Merlin: I think you're thinking of Jeff Tweedy.
Merlin: No, it's the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and they're trying to protect us from things.
Merlin: They have a seed bank, right?
Merlin: Aren't they the seed bank people?
Merlin: Hang on a minute.
Merlin: Are you talking about like a survivalist thing?
Merlin: No, like, well, the seed.
Merlin: You sure you're not thinking of the WWF, the World Wrestling Federation that protects the pandas?
Merlin: A lot of people, their seed bank is just a pile of used tissue.
John: I've got a hell of a seed bank right here.
John: It stretches back weeks.
John: No, I want to go back and revisit the idea of the giant phone.
John: I want to get back to this CFID thing you're talking about or whatever.
John: I just missed it.
John: Oh, RFID.
John: But no, I remember very distinctly in the early 90s when the first wave of...
John: Not like Raver, the first wave of Ravers I think of as sort of Madchester, Madchester Ravers, right?
John: But the second wave of Wavers, if you will, where they all had pacifiers and giant pants and they were wearing shop glasses and they were very Burning Man-y, like they had goggles on a lot of them.
Merlin: Yeah, I know what you mean.
Merlin: There was a crossover.
Merlin: There was the, because you had, I mean, not to be too precious about this, but you had like house music.
Merlin: It was kind of a thing.
Merlin: That's right, house music.
Merlin: But then the Madchester came along and you had all that bullshit like Happy Mondays, which I still can't believe anybody liked.
Merlin: And there wasn't really music.
John: I think that was our program.
Merlin: It's a lot of stomping and a lot of screaming.
Merlin: And it wasn't very good.
Merlin: And the guy couldn't really sing.
Merlin: And the music wasn't really any particular kind of music.
Merlin: But it was of its time.
Merlin: And so people would go and they'd dance around to that because they're English.
Merlin: And then... And Spanish.
Merlin: And French.
Merlin: Yes, yes, yes.
Merlin: Increasingly French.
Merlin: But the second wave, I was afraid... That's when you get into more of the... And that's where you get the wave of ravers.
John: I was afraid of, uh, uh, that I was kind of like with the, uh, with the space clarinets.
John: Yeah.
John: It seemed like, wait a minute.
John: Is this the thing we're all going to laugh about?
John: Or is this the, have we turned to the page?
John: Uh,
John: Is this the new, is everybody going to be doing this in 15 years and will never remember a time?
Merlin: But you remember like having a foot in both of those worlds.
Merlin: On the one hand you go, clearly it's silly for a grown man to wear clown pants and have a pacifier.
Merlin: But on the other hand, it's like, you know, I don't want to reject everything out of hand just because I don't understand it.
John: Well, exactly right.
John: And there are so many things right now.
John: I was thinking about this the other day.
John: So many.
John: So many things right now where you're like, is this the is are we at the beginning of a thing where this is the this is a lasting I'm missing out.
Merlin: It's like it's like it's like it would be like in 1969.
Merlin: Like I'm not doing Snapchat.
Merlin: I looked at Snapchat.
Merlin: I find it totally confusing.
Merlin: Am I the guy who goes like, I'm not going to watch the moon landing because that's not such a big deal.
John: right are you are you on the wrong side of history right or i mean in particular right now we have so many ideas that are fashionable so many ideas about what the what the future is going to look like or how like my whole life my whole young life i was like dad you don't know anything perfect derp and then as i got older i was like oh it turns out my dad knew some stuff yeah
John: Now we're in a cultural moment where there's a whole generation of people who are like, you don't know anything.
John: And maybe they're right.
John: Or maybe it's a stranger, John.
John: Yeah.
John: Maybe some of these ideas are cultural cul-de-sac.
John: It's really hard to know.
John: I agree.
John: How we're going to be in 15 years.
Merlin: The thing is that there are certain kinds of things like, you know, in retrospect, looking at video of civil rights protesters like they had everything going for them.
Merlin: They had they'd had they'd had a really shitty history as human beings.
Merlin: Terrible things were visited upon them.
Merlin: And yet they looked cool.
Merlin: They acted cool.
Merlin: They were tough as nails.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And like, you know, say what you will about Lewis and America and the Nation of Islam.
Merlin: But man, those guys look sharp.
Merlin: They look sharp.
Merlin: That was a great look.
Merlin: And so in retrospect, we look back and think, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: The Kennel had pluses and minuses.
Merlin: But what I'm trying to say is you cannot always judge the space clarinets and the waver-wavers and the burning hair.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You can't always judge it by how well they pull off the fashion part because there could be a seed, back to the seed bank, a seed of a fantastic idea buried inside all those clown pants.
John: This is what I worry about because if I launch myself back into the early 80s where I'm watching Buck Rogers in the 21st century, there was a lot of dancing in that television show that revolved around people each grabbing one end of a scarf, sometimes a long gauzy scarf, and kind of waltzing around as though around a maypole.
John: Except there's no pole.
John: They're just holding the scarf up in the air and dancing.
John: Was the music like fancy chamber music?
John: Well, sort of, except played through space clarinet.
Merlin: Oh, space music, yeah.
John: Right?
John: So it was space music, and they were doing this dance that seemed kind of like a mating dance, but they were obviously very sophisticated space people of the future.
John: And it actually kind of connected to the dancing that they did in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
John: Sort of, you know, the guitar swooping.
John: Everything in the future as seen from the 80s involved some kind of hand motion dancing.
Merlin: It's kind of like what, like Morris dancing meets rhythmic gymnastics?
Yeah.
John: Well, except very slow, right?
John: It always took place very slowly.
John: Like the Buck Rogers dancing was very slow.
John: So was the guitar swooping motion of Bill and Ted.
John: It was all very, you know, it's not like frenetic dancing.
John: And so you look now and you think,
John: Wow.
John: Is it are we actually closer to the future with with the goggles and the clown pants and the vaping than we are?
John: Because, you know, when I see a picture of Malcolm X in 1960 or when I see the, you know, the the people in Selma, like you're absolutely right.
Merlin: There is sitting there at the lunch counter, like in like a necktie.
John: There's no better fashion in the history of time.
John: So badass.
John: Than 1959 to 1962.
John: And you wonder, like, it's sort of like the cars of 1967.
John: Why don't we just go back to that?
John: We've never, you know, and this is the crazy, I sound like an absolute crazy person.
John: But I think because those fashions actually predate me, I'm not doing the weird nostalgia thing of, like,
Merlin: why why uh why don't we just all drive 1987 cars which would sound crazy but to say 1967 cars from before i was born that doesn't sound crazy when they when they do it doesn't sound crazy but the problem is people do try to do that but when they do it it would be like going to like the cheap carnival in town where they want to draw the caricature of you uh with the giant head kick on the soccer ball and you're like that's not really what i look like and like that's what you get for a buck
Merlin: And that feels like, oh, 1967, like, have you ever actually seen one of these cars?
Merlin: These things that people make today look like a box that arrives from Amazon that just happens to be painted orange.
John: Yeah, one time I was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague, and it's covered with people doing those drawings, except they're not.
Merlin: Is this the night you got mugged?
John: No, no, no.
John: And that was a different town.
John: Sorry.
John: I can't keep all your bridge anecdotes.
Merlin: It's true.
John: There's a lot.
John: A lot is going on on the bridges in Europe.
John: That's a main.
John: Because what happens is the people on the one side and the people on the other side, they meet in the middle.
John: Yeah.
John: But on the Charles Bridge there are all these people.
John: People have little contraptions where it's like an organ grinder and some little puppet is dancing.
John: I'm sure that you'll find somebody with a monkey.
John: A lot of people are drawing.
John: There's juggling.
John: You know, it's a thing.
John: Half the tourists in Prague only go across the bridge to go back across the bridge.
John: Who got a bridge like that?
John: Right.
John: Oh, that's right.
John: You do.
John: But there are a lot of people that actually have to go across this bridge.
Merlin: That's so interesting to think of it that way because I never thought of it in quite those terms.
Merlin: Like what are your uses for a bridge?
Merlin: The primary use of the bridge for most people is to go from one side to the other for a while and then probably come back.
Merlin: Those are the people that just think of the bridge as a thing that you just go over and come back.
John: You go over and come back, right?
John: How many people go over the Golden Gate Bridge and come back?
John: So many.
Merlin: Yesterday it was so fogged in and so windy and there were all these people out there taking pictures of themselves being cold.
Merlin: I felt so bad for them.
John: But I mean, when you think about that,
John: Would you estimate it was 40% of the traffic or 60% of the traffic?
Merlin: As far as like obviously the foot traffic, there's not that many people that are commuting.
Merlin: Right, from Sausalito.
Merlin: I just need to get from the Presidio up to the Marin Headlands for my executive job.
Merlin: No, it's a lot of people on bikes, and no matter how many times, it never stops being funny.
Merlin: San Francisco is the TSA agent of the world.
Merlin: We keep telling people, ladies and gentlemen, please.
Merlin: I know it says June on your calendar.
Merlin: I know it's probably June in Germany somewhere.
Merlin: Please, please, wear long and hosen.
Merlin: Wear some long pants.
John: Yeah, for sure.
John: Sure, you're going to freeze your ass off.
John: But on the Charles Bridge, I stopped one day.
Merlin: Let's talk about the one that's over the Vlutava River.
Merlin: Yeah, the Vlutava.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, okay.
Merlin: Now I know the one you mean.
Merlin: Sorry, I was confused for a minute.
Merlin: It's a pedestrian-only bridge.
Merlin: It's also known as the Stone Bridge.
Merlin: Is that the one?
Merlin: That's the one.
John: That's exactly right.
John: It has statues along its length.
John: of all the important saints of the Czech people.
John: And it's one of these bridges where, yeah, tens of thousands of people go across it every day for absolutely no reason.
John: I happen to feel like there's a really great bakery on the other side, no one ever goes to it, because it's just waiting there for the normals, for the people that are like, ugh, I gotta go across the Charles Bridge on my way to work.
John: And I think probably if you lived there, you would avoid it at certain times of the year.
John: But I stopped there one time having gone across this bridge, not a million times, but somewhere short of a million and more than 15.
John: And there's a guy there.
John: He's drawing people.
John: And I'm like, you know, I'm going to send a drawing home to my mom because isn't that a nice thing to do?
John: Like, I'll put it in the mail.
Merlin: It's nice.
Merlin: It's personal and it's unusual.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah, and she'll open this package.
Merlin: Is that a shot glass or a tiny spoon?
John: Exactly.
John: It's a little thing.
John: And it's like, oh, I got a package.
John: And you open it up.
John: It's a hand drawing of my son.
John: And it's not going to say anywhere on it that it was done on a bridge.
John: That'll be part of the story that I bring home.
John: So I sit down and this guy's doing this drawing and he's chatting to the other drawers around him.
John: I'm not going to call them artists.
John: And I get this thing.
John: And when he's done, I get this drawing and it is the spitting image of my cousin.
John: Oh, creepy.
John: Like he just did my face just wrong enough that it looked exactly like my cousin Stevie and
John: so much that I thought about sending it to Stevie.
John: Like, hey, we haven't talked in a while.
John: I have this drawing done of you.
John: That's not weird.
John: And so I didn't want to send it to my mom because I was like, this isn't a likeness of me, but this guy's doing this drawing for five years.
Merlin: Like she's sending you a picture of your cousin.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Hey, mom.
John: That's kind of weird.
John: I have this drawing done of Stevie.
John: Not sure what to do with it.
John: Happy Mondays.
John: So I carried it with me because I'd paid $5 for it or $15.
John: I didn't want to throw it away.
John: And when the guy was like, here's your drawing, I was like, hmm.
John: And he said $5.
John: It was clear to both of us that it was shite.
John: But he was like, $5.
John: And I was like, here you go.
John: And we sort of parted ways without a handshake or anything like, hmm, all right.
John: Thanks for your help.
John: But I carried it with me.
John: I carried it with me, unwilling to throw it away, but also unwilling to send it to anyone and knowing I would never display it or use it for anything.
John: Uh, I carried it with me until it became a, like a talisman of a certain kind of thing.
John: Like here's this shitty drawing that I can't get rid of.
John: And I eventually one day like unburdened myself of, of, of it.
John: And I think I might've even thrown it in a river, a later river.
Yeah.
John: Tell me, Merlin, how at risk?
John: I have two.
John: No, I'm giving away a lot of stuff.
John: You don't want to do this.
John: People are going to be very upset.
John: Don't do this.
John: Please don't do this.
John: Are you sincerely worried?
Merlin: Are you going to talk about passwords?
Merlin: No, not passwords.
Okay.
Merlin: I also want to talk more about Morris dancing and... I only have one password for all my stuff.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And it's the name of my cat.
John: Whose name is cat?
John: I've said the name of the cat on the program several times.
John: No.
John: What is the actual risk of somebody scanning me as I walk past... Oh, for RFIs.
Merlin: See, that's a good question.
Merlin: I don't know.
I...
Merlin: I don't know a lot about RFIDs.
Merlin: And again, also because I don't know a lot about the way that you capture the information from RFIDs.
Merlin: I remember a few years back reading a fascinating article about Walmart, as there are so many fascinating.
Merlin: But reading basically about how their infrastructure works.
Merlin: And we know about things like their just-in-time delivery.
Merlin: We know about the ability to use computers to track the need for things and what works well and what sells well.
Merlin: And we know about all the business relationships.
John: What's their just on time delivery?
Merlin: It seems to me that if you order something you would like it to it to arrive a little bit before Just on time well JIT just in time and so and so part of what part of Walmart success comes down to their network of massive warehouses located around the US and
Merlin: And an ability that people like Amazon have now gotten extremely good at, which is to anticipate what kind of stuff will be needed where, not just based on what season it is.
Merlin: It isn't like Walgreens putting fucking fans up in an aisle in western San Francisco because it's summertime.
Merlin: Yay.
Merlin: Nice.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, thanks.
Merlin: Thanks for the extra SPF 50.
Merlin: That'll be real handy.
Merlin: Got any mufflers?
No.
Merlin: What the fuck?
Merlin: No, so they're like, oh, we're being real smart.
Merlin: We've got an aisle called Seasonal where we put the Easter shit.
Merlin: No, much more than that.
Merlin: So anyway, the idea with Just In Time is that they have the ability to understand a whole lot of stuff about their supply chain from where the basic plastics are mined all the way down to how people will buy stuff in the store, what goes on an end cap, which kind of deal they could get on plastic pickles, all that kind of stuff.
John: Do you think that Amazon knows that I'm going to buy new pads for my 7506s?
John: Like, is there somebody there that's like, ooh, I can feel a disturbance in the forest?
Merlin: As this has been explained to me, it's not quite as creepy or magical as you would think, but...
Merlin: There is an element, and I want to come back to Walmart, but the idea with Amazon is that they can anticipate what people in the area that they supply are more likely than not to order based on stuff.
Merlin: So, for example, let's say, I mean, this is probably not scientific, but let's say that there is something that's getting super hot, like Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: Like, it's a very popular card game.
Merlin: It's been the number one card game on... But say there's something like that.
Merlin: There's a new thing that pops up that suddenly goes on a national list, goes from number 7,000 to number 89, like within a few days.
John: You're talking about Cabbage Pats dolls.
Merlin: Could be, could be.
Merlin: But the thing is, then they notice another pattern, which is that a bunch of people in...
Merlin: The city of San Francisco have added that item to their wish list or added that item to their cart.
Merlin: Think about it this way.
Merlin: Just for the sake of argument, let's say 100 people in San Francisco have added something to their cart.
Merlin: A given SKU, a given ASIN has gone into their cart.
Merlin: If they were just for the shits and giggles to have 10 of those in town, even though they haven't been ordered yet—
John: Oh, I see.
Merlin: That's entirely reasonable, because there's a pretty good chance somebody's going to buy those.
Merlin: Sure, it's in somebody's cart.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And so for stuff, they can use a whole bunch of different signals to figure out smart ways to supply.
Merlin: And then obviously there's all kinds of shit, like cables for iPhones, all kinds of stuff.
Merlin: You better have those.
Merlin: You know, everybody buys Mrs. Meyers.
Merlin: That's just how it works.
John: What's Mrs. Meyers?
Merlin: It's a spray for making your house smell like a watermelon.
Merlin: No, really?
Merlin: People buy this?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I have a button for it.
Merlin: I can hit the button until it gets delivered to my house.
John: So your house smells like watermelon?
Merlin: Well, grapefruit.
Merlin: It used to smell like bacon and coffee.
Merlin: You're sweet to say so.
Merlin: So they got really good at this at the Walmart.
Merlin: And so what I'm trying to get at at length is that supposedly one part of their ability to do this is RFID technology.
Merlin: So anytime you buy a dingus...
Merlin: You open up the box on the dingus.
Merlin: You open up the box inside the box with the dingus.
Merlin: And you'll notice there's two creepy little things in there.
Merlin: There's a creepy little white strip and a creepy little square strip.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, I know those.
Merlin: And the story goes that those are there.
Merlin: I think one of them is for loss prevention vis-a-vis stealing.
Merlin: And the other one is an ARFID that is a unique identifier for that serial numbered object.
Merlin: So at a given time in Walmart, that stuff gets scanned and put on the shelf.
Merlin: They now have like an instant idea of exactly how much stuff is stored.
Merlin: It was designed to be for supply chain.
Merlin: But because your credit card's got a chip now, because your passport has an RFID, I think the concern people have is that you're walking by, somebody's got a scanner going.
John: Oh, I see.
John: So if you're in a Walmart...
John: They could pull your data down, but it's not like somebody's cruising around in an unmarked white band.
Merlin: I think you've got to be fairly close.
Merlin: I think that's the thing.
Merlin: It isn't like you can have a drone fly over the city and collect everybody's arphids.
Merlin: I think it's more like Bluetooth, I'm guessing.
John: So this is a thing.
John: If I were one of those people that had some thing in my wallet...
John: Like you go to the gas station sometimes and they're like, hey, just touch your wallet and we'll take your money.
John: And I'm like, does not seem like a thing I will ever want to do.
John: I don't want to touch my wallet to a gas pump.
John: Oh, when you get the dingus, when you get the little fob?
John: Yeah, and then they take my money, but it's not a fob.
John: It's another eel.
John: It's a thing inside.
John: It's like your credit card has the RFIDs or some other kind of.
John: Some kind of chip, a smart chip, yeah.
John: Yeah, it's like the old app Bump, which for a while people would come up and say, do you have Bump?
John: And you'd bump your phones.
John: They didn't have a cream for that now.
John: I've got four or five people's personal information in my phone that still says like arrived at through bump.
John: But like you had bump, some kind of bump technology within the card that's in your wallet.
John: Yes.
John: But anyway, so I have that enhanced driver's license and I have a passport and I have my TSA supercard.
John: Yeah.
John: And for a while, I carried them around in a little foil sleeve like a crazy, like a chemtrails person.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Like tinfoil hat.
John: And then one day I was like, what is this?
John: This is insane.
John: From what am I protecting myself?
John: Yeah, some Russian hacker has figured out a way to get my passport information from being close to a gas pump.
Merlin: We should probably research this with information, but my gut is... Letters, I bet.
Merlin: What's that?
Merlin: We're going to get a lot of letters.
Merlin: Yeah, well.
Merlin: I bet people are going to tell us a bunch of them.
Merlin: I'm thinking about taking down my contact link.
Merlin: It's just not bringing me joy anymore.
Merlin: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: You don't want to hear from fans?
Merlin: Yeah, that's exactly why, John, because I don't want to hear from fans.
Merlin: Fans contact me other ways, and they say, hello.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: I'm talking about today I woke up to a slew.
Merlin: I'm doing this thing now where I try not to look at my phone when I first wake up.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And I do other things in my life before I look at my phone, which is very difficult to do because when you unplug it, I can clearly see just out of the corner of my eye that it's filled with notifications.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Louis C.K.
John: says he doesn't masturbate to images on computers anymore.
John: He sits around and waits until a sexy idea pops into his head.
John: Oh, boy.
John: He's a farm-to-table masturbator.
John: He sure is.
John: And then he sits and he thinks about it until he's like, hmm, hmm.
John: I've got a, you know, like, this is a very sexy idea.
John: I feel inspired.
John: Instead of like, oh, it's 4.15, I'd better call up some internet porn.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: No, he's being self-involved in a much more engaged and intellectual way.
Merlin: He is wise.
Merlin: Yeah, he's super wise.
Merlin: So anyway, but I think the notion is that... Wait, you got a bunch of emails, though, you're saying.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Were they emails offering you the opportunity to apply for a show?
Merlin: No, I get a lot of emails about people wanting to appear on a podcast that I do, as you know.
Merlin: And then I get a lot of email from people having to, they want to buy a website of mine, they want to advertise on a website, they want to write on a website of mine.
Merlin: And it's just dispiriting because I know I'm not going to write back to them, but even the effort that it takes to archive slash delete their email is exhausting to me.
Merlin: I don't like beginning my day with bullshit.
John: Right, right.
John: You have to comb through all these things.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I mean, the thing is, it would be like, I mean, like in Minority Report, you walk around and the billboards talk to you and stuff like that.
Merlin: It would be like that, except the billboards act butthurt if I don't invite them to my house to hang out.
John: Let me ask you about your program where you have guests.
John: Yes.
John: Do you have guests?
John: Not once.
John: On the program?
John: Not a single time.
John: So when people say – when you get multiple, multiple emails from people saying – And a follow-up.
John: And a follow-up.
John: Just circling back.
Merlin: I'd love to be a guest on your program.
Merlin: Let me tell you why it would be a good fit.
John: It's an award-winning program that's been on the air for a long, long time.
John: Huge.
John: Never had a guest.
John: Never had a guest.
John: I see.
Merlin: Yeah, there's three parts, at least three parts to this.
Merlin: Have you talked about this elsewhere?
Merlin: No, I've talked about it with you before.
Merlin: But, you know, we get a note, and it says the first thing, really, let's just get this out of the way.
Merlin: This is pretty embarrassing for me.
Merlin: I am a huge fan of your podcast about productivity.
Merlin: I just, it's, oh, love your podcast.
Merlin: Never miss it.
Merlin: Huge, huge, huge fan.
Merlin: All the great shit.
Merlin: I have to tell you, number two.
Merlin: I think I would be a great guest on your show with my new book, you know, 115 new ways to turbocharge your power hacks.
Merlin: You won't believe what happens next.
Merlin: And then third, there's been at length, there's an explanation that almost always uses the exact same phraseology, which is here's why I think I'd be a great fit.
Merlin: 101 super hacks.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: In the case of somebody not too long ago named Peck Pong Pet.
Merlin: Peck Pong Pet wanted to be on the show I do with Dan Benjamin.
Merlin: And in giving us some links to things that he had recently done, buried in those links, I went and I looked at the description of an episode of a show he was on.
Merlin: Of course you did.
Merlin: Where, do you have trouble getting bloggers to respond to your emails?
Merlin: Peck Pong Pet...
Merlin: And there was a part of me, my eyes kind of rolled back in my head for a minute.
Merlin: Like, you know, like I touched the max found set out tree.
Merlin: I started went into this vision quest where I was like, this guy is fucking awesome.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Because he's done it.
Merlin: Another time, there's a guy who only works four hours a week.
Merlin: And one time in an interview, he told somebody about how he had engineered contacting me, even though he kind of knew that I didn't want to talk to him.
Merlin: He was able to engineer a way for us to get in contact.
Merlin: And he had a show about that.
John: He talked about this on another show.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: See, this is a whole thing.
Merlin: I've been trying to get a hold of Merlin Mann.
Merlin: I know a lot of you have.
Merlin: You've got the dark net, the dark podcast net, which is like the podcast about getting on podcasts.
Merlin: Yeah, the tour, the onion of podcasts.
Merlin: But, I mean, to just draw out the humor of what you're describing here, and this is what makes me tired.
Merlin: is that to get to the point where somebody has obviously never listened to this show, and let's just be clear, I don't give a flying fuck whether you've ever heard the show.
Merlin: What bugs me is the whole pretense of this bullshit email is that you've heard the show, when in fact, if you had listened to part of an episode, you would know that we have had guest hosts.
Merlin: We have had you, we've had Jonathan Coulton, Rob Corddry, there's been a handful of people that have stood in as guest hosts, but we've never had anybody on the show
Merlin: in five and a half years, to talk about their book.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: It's never happened.
John: No, you've never had anyone over to your house to talk about a book?
John: Mm-mm.
John: You've never talked about a book with anybody, even through TerraVille.
Merlin: Talk about a book, but, you know, it's just, there's, I don't know why, and I'm going into Holden Caulfield mode right here, but that makes me sad to have to wake up to that.
Merlin: Like a fish needs a bicycle.
Merlin: Oh, you're telling me?
Merlin: You have the lesbian over here.
John: I had an idea.
Merlin: Are we going to come back?
Merlin: We're going to come back.
Merlin: We still have got to get back to River Phoenix, Walmart, ARFIDS, and I still want to talk about Morris dancing.
Merlin: I want to know more about ARFIDS.
Merlin: I feel like I need to do some research on that.
John: Well, see, I feel like I don't need to do some research.
Merlin: Good for you.
John: Because you and other people are going to do that research for me.
John: And then you're going to send me emails that warn me.
John: This is so chemtrails, John.
John: I got I got I got a text this morning.
John: Not a text.
John: I keep thinking of tweets as texts now.
Merlin: I think of emails as letters.
John: I'm sorry.
John: I received a letter from a concerned fan.
John: They did that wonderful thing where they threatened to mansplain Frisbee golf to me.
John: And I was like, it's so good of you to threaten to do that without doing it.
John: Like, I appreciate that.
John: Because what they've communicated is, I have this information.
John: I know you don't want it.
John: But listen, it's there for you.
John: Mm-hmm and and that's that's lovely because now I don't have to Wikipedia frisbee golf Not that I was going to is that what it's called.
Merlin: They probably have a cute name for it No, they have they call it disc golf.
John: Oh, of course You know, it's something else John we ever contacted by a Shriner this week As a matter of fact, yes I got a lot of Shriner emails from people who had already contacted me explaining that I'll say same Shriner different day
John: Explaining that shrine is an offshoot of or maybe just like a deeply embedded component of Masonic life, although perhaps in decline or maybe ironically in ascendance.
Merlin: Well, that seems useful.
John: Thank you.
Merlin: This may or may not be this, and it may or may not be growing or not.
Merlin: I didn't probe.
John: Didn't probe the Shriner.
John: I didn't probe, and that also is a component of Shrinerism.
John: Don't probe the Shriner.
John: What I forgot to say last week was, as I was describing how my mom hates hillbillies, there is nothing she hates more than Shriners.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: That was the second one.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Two things.
Merlin: Number one, two things.
Merlin: Your mother and your father, just to review because people don't normally listen to this show.
Merlin: Two things about your parents.
Merlin: Well, your parents are the least racist people you've ever met.
Merlin: Probably next to Donald Trump, I'm guessing.
Merlin: But there are two groups that your mother withholds nothing in her ire.
Merlin: And that is number one, hillbillies.
Merlin: And then you had a second.
Merlin: You're telling me now the second is Shriners.
John: Yeah, we never got back to the second one, which is Shriners.
John: She just has this lifelong, and it's because she worked as a waitress in Ohio in the 50s, and she said the Shriners would come in, and they kept cattle prods, and they would prod the waitresses with cattle prods as they were getting drunk in the middle of the day.
John: And, you know, it's a different era of Shriners, right?
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Contemporary Shriners.
Merlin: It's a more enlightened age, yeah.
John: Well, yeah.
John: I mean, now they ride Vespa scooters or something.
John: Now they have pork pie hats.
Merlin: Did they have mirrors on their shoes, John?
Merlin: I bet you they did.
Merlin: My mom made that sound like a huge menace in the 50s, as men with mirrors on their shoes.
Merlin: Mirrors on their shoes.
Merlin: And to this day, I've never seen mirrors on a shoe, but I do think about it.
Merlin: That's why you wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident.
Merlin: Or you find a Shriner with a shoe mirror.
John: That was a great, great Morrissey song.
John: Any more, you never see a Shriner.
John: But when I was a kid, we saw Shriners, and my mom would just, under her breast, she'd just be like, fucking Shriner.
John: And so I grew up with a very strong association with Shriners, and there was a shrine temple not four blocks from our house.
John: So there were Shriners all the time, driving their little cars, saving kids from sickness.
John: And I went by the Shriner temple, both very curious about what was happening in there, because there were no windows in the building, but also like...
John: already filled with suspicion and fear of the Shriners with their cattle props.
Merlin: That's horrible.
Merlin: Yeah, it's awful.
Merlin: Go ahead.
Merlin: No, I'm almost definitely remembering this wrong because, you know, sometimes just words collapse in your head.
Merlin: And there's a phrase going through my mind, which is Shrine Circus or Shriner Circus.
Merlin: And what I'm remembering probably wrong was that the Shriners had a circus when I was a kid.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I might be concatenating or conflating the idea of clowns and shriners and being scared.
Merlin: But I feel like there was a circus when I was a kid.
John: Yeah.
John: And now I'm remembering the name of this temple.
John: It was very clever, actually.
John: They called it the...
John: Al Aska, like done in an Arabic script, like Al Medina or Al Bundy.
John: Right.
John: They had changed the name of Alaska into an Arab sounding like Al Aska.
John: Oh, oh, come on.
John: Right.
John: They had they had and they did it.
John: They did it in like a script, like an Orientalist script font where it felt like an Arab word.
John: I'll ask.
Merlin: That's like a Chuck Jones cartoon.
John: Yeah, it was very like, ooh.
Merlin: You should go down to that temple down in Albuquerque.
Merlin: Albuquerque.
John: And you imagine that in there, there were dancing girls with veils.
John: Yeah.
John: But there weren't.
John: There were little cars and cattle prods.
Merlin: But there was a kind of, like, I want to say, really, just with all respect to Mr. Saeed, an Orientalist kind of bent.
Merlin: It was very, like, Egyptian, but there was something kind of, like, spooky Oriental about Shriners that seemed self-consciously ridiculous.
Merlin: Well, the Fezes were sort of Ottoman.
Merlin: The Fezes are a little bit Turkish.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But then you got the tiny cars where you're basically saying, look at me, I'm a dick.
Merlin: I'm driving around a tiny car.
John: Well, who knows what a tiny car communicates anymore.
John: People might be like, I like it.
John: I want it.
John: Like a smart car.
John: I want a little three-quarter size Rolls Royce to drive back and forth from school.
Merlin: Now the children of Shriners are probably driving smart cars.
John: I bet you they are, little tiny ones, those little BMW ones that look like a toy.
Merlin: There was a rash of smart car flippings a couple years ago in San Francisco.
Merlin: Where people would just turn them upside down?
Merlin: This is not funny.
Merlin: San Francisco has so many fucking problems.
Merlin: No, but there was a thing where basically overnight people were just walking around, and with you and a few of your buddies, you could flip a smart car.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: With your hands.
Merlin: I kind of don't hate that, although it's hateful.
Merlin: It's awful.
Merlin: Well, there's just so much awful stuff in San Francisco.
Merlin: It'd be funnier if it were somewhere else, I guess.
John: A smart car is an... Yeah, if that was happening in Vienna, we'd be like, yes, exactly.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't understand.
John: The Viennese spring.
John: Viennese spring.
John: I don't know.
John: And why didn't we intervene in the Viennese spring in 1958?
John: I changed my icon.
John: I don't like smart cars, but I do wonder.
John: So here they are smart cars, things that basically should be given away free because it's just a little it's like a little transporter for two people.
John: Yeah, it's not a thing you should buy, particularly not a thing you should buy for twenty seven thousand dollars or whatever they cost.
John: Are they that much?
John: I think they're a lot of money.
Merlin: Is the primary thing the size?
Merlin: I mean, for example, when you get a Prius.
Merlin: You don't buy it for the speed and handling.
Merlin: Was the smart part how it handles energy things?
John: I think it was not just how it handles energy, but it was a whole urbanist revisioning of the city, and that's why sometimes you'll see smart cars backed into the curb,
Merlin: Oh, almost like a motorcycle.
John: Yeah, by way of communicating that in the space that it takes to park your car, we could put five smart cars there by efficiencying the entire operation of a cityscape.
Merlin: Well, the nice thing about a smart car that I do look at it and go, oh, smart car, is our neighborhood, you know what our neighborhood's like.
John: Your garages are small.
Merlin: You have small garages, but also it's kind of weird.
Merlin: I mean, I don't think these streets were designed.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Maybe they were designed to have street parking.
Merlin: But even with the relatively smaller car sizes of today, there's still so many places where you can't quite fit a car.
John: Well, they were designed to tie up your horse there.
Merlin: I guess so.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But, I mean, like you'll have these two driveways that are just like, you know, nine, eight, nine feet apart, seven, eight feet apart, where there's no way that the jet is going to fit in there.
Merlin: But a smart car.
Merlin: Beep, beep.
Merlin: No problem.
Merlin: That's right.
John: When did you start saying, yeah, like Chris Walla?
John: How did I do that?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Cool, cool.
John: I don't like smart cars.
John: And in particular, I don't like them because I've been waiting 25 years for people to start driving those motorcycles like the one in Akira.
John: Do you remember the motorcycle in Akira?
John: I'm looking it up right now.
John: And it was only the lead characters.
Merlin: Oh, just the animated program?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, look at that.
Merlin: It's like a light cycle.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: You sit back in it like you're kind of driving a chopper almost.
John: Like a recumbent motorcycle.
John: Yeah, and the motorcycle is hinged in the middle somehow like one of those Green Goblin bikes from the 70s.
John: Oh, this is cool.
John: And it's like, what a cool bike.
John: All you'd need to do is just extend the canopy a little bit and it would be an enclosed, you know, you could use those big fat tires that you see on the back of Harleys now.
John: It would be a little bit like the motorcycle from the Batmobile.
Merlin: Oh, I know what you mean with the big fat tire.
John: Yeah.
John: If we're going to have a thing like a smart car where you drive around like, derp, derp, derp, I'm an engineer.
John: I went to school in Prague.
John: Why not have a fucking one person light cycle?
John: Right?
John: You just have a fucking light cycle.
Merlin: But you know what's nice about those fat tires?
Merlin: It seems to me that one of the problems with a motorcycle is the surpassingly small amount of surface area where the vehicle is touching the road at a given time.
Merlin: I mean, not many square inches of motorcycle are touching the road.
Merlin: If you get those big Batman tires, but you also introduce a little bit of a Segway gyroscope to it.
John: Yeah, that's exactly right.
John: You put some Segway technology.
John: You have big fat tires.
John: You take a... It's basically a Segway where you lay down.
John: A laying down Segway.
John: But you know those scooters that are like commuter scooters that are bigger and they have big fat butts and people actually ride them on the freeway but they're sitting up on it like a scooter?
John: Like a Jonathan Price Brazil car?
John: If you...
John: Well, not quite.
John: It seems like a lot of times it's sort of a dykes on bikes thing almost, but like people ride them to work.
John: They go 65 miles an hour, but it's like it's open in the middle kind of like a scooter so you can wear your, I don't know what, suit or kilt or swilt.
John: But if you can make those, why can't you take a bat cycle, a light cycle, and an Akira cycle, lay back with those for a little bit, think about them as I have done, and then use your Czech engineering education to actually build a cool thing, a
John: cool, rad thing that would never tip over, that would protect you from the elements, and that probably would be able to use Segway technology to prevent you from ever getting sideswiped by a little old lady in a Volvo.
John: And then we'd be in the future, right?
John: A smart car is not the future.
John: It's a cul-de-sac.
John: Nobody wants that.
John: Nobody wants to ride around in a hard chair.
John: You want to lay back in your super cool motorcycle.
John: The thing is that the Batman and the light cycle both have a real aggressive forward leaning position, don't they?
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Like a crotch rocket.
John: Yeah, but the Akira bike, you're like, you're cooling out.
John: You're like, it's like you're in an Ames chair.
John: In fact, what if you co-branded it with Ames?
Merlin: That's pretty good.
Merlin: That's smart.
Merlin: People love stuff like that.
John: See, it'd be mid-century modern, except in the future.
Merlin: Are you kidding?
Merlin: People would pay crazy amounts.
Merlin: Design within reach?
Merlin: How about design just slightly out of reach?
Merlin: Which I think is actually what design within reach is.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: It's not in reach for me.
Merlin: That place is costly.
John: It's very costly.
John: But if you took that laminated plywood aesthetic of mid-century modern design, but you made it into a super motorcycle.
Merlin: You get a little bubbly wood car that can't fall over.
Merlin: It'd be like a Weeble.
Merlin: It'd be like a Weeble crossed with a light cycle or with a Brazil car.
Merlin: It can't fall over.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know, whatever you can fit in your lap, you get to ride.
Merlin: And then it becomes self-driving?
Merlin: Oh, brother.
John: Because I feel like a lot of the cars that we have now are actually designed after the car in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, which even then was a chintzy car.
John: It's like the car in the Tom Petty video where they're out in the desert and they find a video game parlor.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Remember that car?
John: And both of those cars, it just seems like they built something out of, like they recycled some tinfoil and put it over a Volkswagen bug.
John: Yeah.
John: That's not the future.
John: That's not the future.
John: The future is mid-century modern motorcycles.
Merlin: I'm looking at the, I guess it's pronounced Isetta.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Which I think is the Jonathan Price Brazil car.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: It's got like a door in the front that opens, like where you would think, would expect, go Google I-S-E-T-T-A.
John: Oh, so the Isetta is a little BMW from, it was actually the first smart car.
Merlin: Kind of.
Merlin: It looks cool, though.
Merlin: I mean, it's not much bigger than, like, one of the scooters from, like, Quadrophenia.
John: Well, and I think that the idea of the Assetto was that it was, what, a two-cylinder motor?
John: It was like a motorcycle engine.
Merlin: It's really little.
Merlin: But the thing is, what I'm not getting across that's so cool, I'm pretty sure this is the Brazil car.
Merlin: You open, it's got a, so, like, you look at the front of the car with the windshield, with the single windshield wiper on it, like where you'd expect, like, the hood to be on a car.
Merlin: It's got a latch.
Merlin: You open that.
Merlin: That's how you get in the car.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I was very confused when you came here in the GMC RV and it only had one door.
Merlin: That really disoriented me for some reason.
Merlin: It makes sense now.
John: All you need is one door.
John: Do you remember the Chevy Suburbans until 1972 had three doors?
John: They had a driver's door, a passenger door.
John: And then one door for the second row seats.
John: Oh, that seems very smart in its way.
John: Yeah, so you pull up to the curb.
John: If you're in the back seat, you're not going to get out on the street side.
Merlin: You say whatever your little kid says.
Merlin: You say slide, Clyde.
Merlin: Slide, Clyde.
Merlin: Slide, Clyde.
John: Do you ever say slide, Clyde?
John: Never.
Merlin: How about move over, Rover?
Merlin: You ever say that?
Merlin: I have said move over, Rover.
Merlin: I say that to my daughter about 16 times a day when she sits on my area, my area of the couch that I bought.
Merlin: I say move over, Rover.
Merlin: I'm going to start saying slide, Clyde.
John: I'm going to say move over, Rover, whenever someone is on my side of the bed because I have a clear side of the bed.
John: Don't get on my side of the bed.
John: It's not complicated.
John: You know what I mean?
John: It's not complicated.
John: You walk into my room, you know which side of the bed I'm on.
Merlin: Babies understand half.
John: That's right.
John: If we're in a hotel, you should walk.
Merlin: It doesn't change anything.
Merlin: Half is still half.
Merlin: This is your side.
Merlin: This is my side.
John: Yeah, but everybody seems to feel like they need to be over on my side.
John: It's like, no.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: Get on your side.
John: No, that's why it's called your side.
John: That's right, exactly.
John: It's right in the name.
Merlin: It's right in the name.
Merlin: My side has my name in it.
Merlin: That's me.
Merlin: I'm mine.
Merlin: My is me.
Merlin: I'm me.
Merlin: And then you have what's called your side, which is your side.
Merlin: It explains everything in this one very simple phrase.
Merlin: It's your inside.
Merlin: It's the side of the bed that is for your.
John: in the middle of the night don't get your feet on my side even oh no because see that's still that's yours that's john's side of the bed the feet go on your side of the bed because guess whose feet those are your feet feet i'm gonna start saying move over rover over rover move over rover and let jimmy take over slide clod let me ask you this yes did you do you remember learning the word nautical
Merlin: Nautical.
Merlin: I don't remember specifically learning it.
Merlin: I remember it seeming old-timey and kind of Jules Verne when I first heard it.
Merlin: Right, but... Nautical, to me, Nautical is not, I don't think of like a destroyer.
Merlin: I think about a ship that's got, you got a sextant, you got one of those big compass thingies, whatever those are.
Merlin: Yeah, it could be a steam ship, but it's still...
Merlin: Nautical is you got a big captain's wheel.
Merlin: You got rigging that gets climbed.
Merlin: You might have a brig.
Merlin: But nautical also is a scientific room that you go in where you have charts and things, and those are all nautical things.
John: Right.
John: But I think you probably heard and understood the word nautical before even making those associations.
John: Probably.
John: As just something that had to do with the sea.
John: Like that's a nautical themed bar or it's nautical, right?
John: Serve water.
John: When did you, and I think, I'm not even going to phrase this in terms of a quiz because I already have the answer for you.
John: Yes.
John: But I think the word bovine is similar, right?
John: You don't remember learning the word bovine.
John: No, I remember it seeming funny from the beginning.
John: It's pretty funny, but bovine also is a thing that... There's not a reason to use it.
John: No one ever says bovine.
Merlin: Oh, that's one of those special words you just use to be cute or funny or smart.
John: Yeah, but it's a thing that you know because you've read some article or some description or someone has – it has come up.
John: Even though bovine has no – there's nothing in the word to suggest it.
Merlin: It's a distinction that most people in cities today don't need to make.
Merlin: Do you want the regular version or the bovine version?
Merlin: Of the antibiotic?
Merlin: Of whatever.
Merlin: Like when do you have the need to use the word?
Merlin: You just go cow stuff.
John: Yeah, but you would – yeah, cow stuff, right, unless you were reading an article about bovines or blowvines.
John: But yeah, so I'm working on this theory of language that's connected to a theory of education, that there's a certain vocabulary that –
John: You're never going to, if you have one of those vocabulary calendars where every day there's a new word and you rip off the top of the thing and it's like, today's word is bovine.
John: If you don't already know what bovine is that you learned at some point from your parents or something, bovine is not a word that you're going to learn from a vocabulary desk calendar.
John: And if they talk about it in school, if they're like today's word is bovine or like here are some – here's 10 words you need to memorize for the vocabulary test –
Merlin: It's not even really like a GRE word.
Merlin: No, no, it's not going to stick, right?
Merlin: It's like I think about like words that I remember learning for the GRE, like lachrymose.
John: Lachrymose, right.
Merlin: There's all these words that you just learned for the GRE.
John: or words that you have read or heard in your own kind of family or your own early education, right?
John: Lacrimose is a word that by the time you've read it 15 times, you're like, all right, what the fuck does that mean?
John: And you go look it up in the dictionary.
John: But you don't, it's not a word that's going to stick if it's edumacated onto you.
John: And this is the, this is one of the problems I think of, or one of the, one of the problems with a theory of education that like, there are, there are,
John: There are imbalances in schools that we need to redress and we need to do that through vocabulary tests and so forth where there's just this weird – there's this vocabulary within the language with these words, nautical, bovine.
John: And I wouldn't even put lacrimose in there but like just words that you just know what they mean.
John: It's not like aeronautical that you can say like, oh, it has the word air in it.
John: Aeronautical is a good word.
John: Yeah, it might be, you know, it's nautical plus air.
John: It's aeronautical even though air is spelled differently.
John: Right.
John: But it's not a thing you could triangulate to.
John: Um, but you just know, and then that, that's, that's the, that kind of, uh, that substrata of knowledge is a thing.
John: I don't know how you would educate into someone.
John: It's like a, it's like an advantage that certain kids have going into school that they're just bathed in a, uh,
John: Already a language that's inaccessible and it's not one that's it's not one that's maybe meant to communicate class.
John: It's just a it's just that it's a it's a vocabulary of people that that use words and no word.
Merlin: I'm not sure if I'm getting your exact point, but I think I feel a thing that I think is related, which is this.
Merlin: So you've got things like learning vocabulary.
Merlin: Well, for example, if you're learning Spanish, you have your vocabulario where you've got some Spanish words.
Merlin: That's, you know, you want to learn what's an aura and a bibliotech and all those things.
Merlin: And my all-time favorite, Montecchia.
Merlin: Montaquilla.
Merlin: I love to say Montaquilla.
Merlin: But anyway, does that make sense?
John: Montaquilla is what I'm going to start saying when somebody gets their feet on my side of the bed.
John: Montaquilla!
Merlin: Montaquilla!
Merlin: Aye, aye, aye!
Merlin: You're butter.
Merlin: And so here's the thing, though.
Merlin: So that makes sense.
Merlin: If you have a primary language, in our case, most of us English...
Merlin: then you're going to say, okay, now I need to go learn all of these, not cognates, but I need to learn the words for things so that I can mentally say when I want to say library, I know I have to say bibliotech, and I learn all those words as I'm kind of working my way through the difficult process of like, you know, a spoonful at a time trying to learn this language.
John: So you're not standing on the street in Mexico City going, libraria.
Merlin: El librario.
Merlin: Librario.
Merlin: But here's the thing, and this is not very smart, but it's just a thing.
Merlin: The way my kid is learning math is very different from the way that I learn math, or I'll say arithmetic.
Merlin: And we can't have time to go too deeply into it, but it's a very different way.
Merlin: I grew up doing math the hard way for no good reason and just memorizing lots of stuff.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The way that she's learning math is a lot smarter and a lot more integrated with how life works.
Merlin: And she's learning things in a way that will make things like algebra much less weird to learn.
Merlin: Her new math is treason.
Merlin: Her new math is treason.
Merlin: Nice.
Merlin: Hey, good pull.
Merlin: I love that band.
Merlin: Here's the thing about vocabulary.
Merlin: Here's the problem.
Merlin: You go out and buy yourself a word-a-day calendar, and you can make yourself sound a little bit fancy because you could say things like, that movie made me lacrimose.
Merlin: But the thing is, that strap-on education is the problem.
Merlin: And here's the thing, and this sounds really condescending.
Merlin: I don't mean it to be.
Merlin: It's just that you learn enough about how to suss out what a word is or where to look it up and when to deploy it correctly.
Merlin: You will learn things like...
Merlin: in the case of people like me who are annoying, that there's a difference between costly and expensive.
Merlin: They mean different things.
Merlin: Say the one you mean.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: If you read enough stuff, you're going to learn that words mean things and different words mean different things.
Merlin: And when you read and read and read and read, and then you think that they can talk and read and read and read, think a little, talk a little, you're going to get good at that.
Merlin: The problem is the strap-on education is this way of saying like, yeah, but if you haven't had all of that, the privilege or benefit of that, you can kind of...
Merlin: I'm not going to say fake.
Merlin: You can simulate.
Merlin: See, again, words.
Merlin: You can simulate that.
Merlin: Simulate.
Merlin: Simulacrum.
Merlin: Simulate and simulacrum.
Merlin: You can also learn to drop the titles of books you almost finished.
John: My lady friend went to law school and learned school.
John: She was very successful in school.
John: And she learned how to be in school, if you know what I'm saying.
John: Oh, God, that's so huge.
John: Nobody teaches you that.
John: Yeah.
John: Like, and the thing is, the blurts is learning how to go to school, learning how to be in school and go to school.
John: And I learned how to be in school on my own.
John: Right.
John: Where I was like, I need to learn how to be in school.
John: Here's what I think being in school is.
John: And everybody was like, nope, nope, nope.
John: That's not what being in school is.
John: And I said, too late.
John: I learned how to be in school already by my own device.
John: Yep.
John: But she learned how to be in school correctly.
John: And part of being in school for her meant to read a certain way.
John: And that reading was to read to to, you know, to skim the education out of the book.
Merlin: And it seems once you know it, it seems like cheating.
Yeah.
Merlin: Well, yeah, because here's what you do.
Merlin: You look at the book.
Merlin: You read the back of the book.
Merlin: You read the flap of the book.
Merlin: You read the table of contents.
Merlin: You go through the index.
Merlin: You see how detailed is the index?
Merlin: What are the parts that are in bold?
Merlin: And you find the parts in the book that you definitely know and the parts you don't know.
Merlin: And you get a shape of the education before you've read a fucking word.
John: Right.
John: And then you go through and you're like chapter headings.
John: You skim through.
John: You find halfway through the paragraph that basically the whole chapter hinges upon.
John: It's the it's the fulcrum of the chapter.
John: Right.
Merlin: You can give it a Terry Gross where you read the first two chapters and then read the beginning and end of every other chapter.
Merlin: And then if you need to, go back and read the whole thing.
Merlin: But spoiler alert, I mean, that's a way to get through a lot of material that doesn't have to be the favorite book you've ever read.
Merlin: That's how a lawyer thinks.
John: Well, and this is one of the interesting things as we try and find a common language, which is that I said, well, here are a couple of novels that meant something to me.
John: And she read them in a day.
John: And I was like, whoa.
Merlin: Did she do a Merlin on you in the first 20 seconds?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I was like, whoa, whoa.
John: There's no way you read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in a day.
John: And she was like, yeah, totally.
John: And I realized, like,
John: oh, there was a whole different relationship to reading happening here that was, and both of us come from privileged places where you expect to go to a good college and you end up in a world of whatever, thinking people.
John: But the relationship, and I have spent many, many, many hours reading literary theory books as though they were novels.
John: Where I'm like reading every word and trying to find a fucking plot in that whole discipline.
John: And just like I'm in this stew of words.
John: 85% of them are made up or in that context completely made up.
John: Like that's not a word that you can use that way.
John: But okay, I'm with you.
John: I'm with you.
John: Or I think I'm with you.
John: And so much of the books, so many of the books that I was exposed to, I read incorrectly.
John: I should have just been reading the table of contents and reading the first two chapters and throw the book in a pyre.
John: But like even trying to find a philosophy of reading that is common, even with people that share your sort of social and class strata –
John: It's very interesting to find these other styles and to say like, oh, shit, in reading this – in me trying to expose you to this novel and get you to treasure it, we have to go back a little bit and start with a whole new – like learn to read a different way.
John: And that's a thing that –
John: when you're talking about a theory of education and you're talking about like, we need to reform the schools, how, what, in what, like, what are you, how are you teaching them to read?
John: And I don't mean like, like stringing in the words together, but like, what is their style of reading?
John: And like, and it's caused me to reflect on my own style of reading.
John: And it's why I can't subscribe to the New York times, right?
John: It takes me, it takes me six hours to read the New York times and it doesn't take everyone else six hours.
Merlin: I guess like the daily, that's my wife, um, Madeline, my wife, she, um, she reads so fast and, and I've tested her.
Merlin: I've, I was like, did you really like, I sent her this thing.
Merlin: I was like, Oh, you got to read this thing about Brexit.
Merlin: It's this, uh, the screen cap that's three, three pages of screen cap from a Facebook comment.
Merlin: And I was like, it's, it's pretty good.
Merlin: It's kind of thought, thought provoking thing about article 25.
Merlin: You should look at this.
Merlin: And it was like, it was like this one, two, three, four.
Merlin: Yeah, that was interesting.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right, I get the idea.
Merlin: Let's play the little funny game called Let's Play Kate Merlin.
Merlin: No, did you actually read it?
Merlin: She's like, yeah, yeah, that was really good.
Merlin: And she does it, and for a long time I thought she was being glib, but she actually can read that fast and comprehend it.
Merlin: My reading is more like this.
Merlin: Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Merlin: I consider myself a not stupid person, but my reading is ridiculously slow.
Merlin: So in terms of your, and I'm not sure this has to do with RFIDs, and I still want to talk about Morris dancing.
Merlin: How does this relate to your theory of education and educations?
John: Well, you know, for a long time, right, we've been trying to get a similar education, a fair education,
John: Sure.
John: Sure.
John: And within that theory of education, there's a lot of understanding that by the time a kid gets to school, they're already on a path and in some cases are like a priori able to digest or able to – they already have a better education just coming from home.
John: So the theory of education then extends to a social theory of how do we get that education in –
Merlin: that that preparation for education in kids before they ever darken the doors not to go to the obvious bit but also in the face of needing to teach the test which is so much a thing now and that's a new thing right that's since the bush administration but like there's not there's not there's not a whole lot of extra time at the end of the day to go back and learn a new thing because yeah there's there's a lot of a lot of test stuff that becomes very important to how that school gets money and stuff like that
John: Yeah, and the tests are all – there's a lot of prejudice within the test of just like – and the idea of – that's a fairly new idea where African-American students don't ask rhetorical questions because rhetorical questions are not part of the language of the African-American community.
John: Is that true?
John: Yeah, so they come into – Isn't that a real thing?
John: Yeah.
John: They come into schools and their white teacher will say, so what is an orange?
John: What is an orange?
John: And the black kids will be like, what?
John: what's a fucking orange and the white kids are like is it a fruit and the teacher will go exactly it's a fruit so we know that an orange is a fruit right and they there's this sort of pedantry that that is where they where the um the rhetorical question is a way of setting up
John: A kind of like, here's the metaphor we're going to use.
John: An orange is a fruit, right?
John: So therefore all fruit are blank.
John: Or you know what I mean?
John: Like there's a kind of, there's a language of rhetoricism in the white style of education and black students go, this is a, this is a stupid question.
John: And so right away there's a language gulf that has nothing to do with, you know, obviously everybody understands what an orange is.
Merlin: And does this a problem related to how we teach or how kids learn?
John: Yeah, right.
John: He said asking rhetorically.
John: Exactly.
John: What it is is that there are all these prejudices way upstream in
John: in terms of the way teachers just talk, right?
John: The way they even approach subjects that puts certain students at a disadvantage before, you know, and, and makes them to the teacher seem dumb or disengaged.
John: They get a, they get a dark mark from pretty early on.
John: Because they're like, huh, that's a stupid question.
John: And the teacher's like, no, no, no, you're not getting it.
John: And they're like, no, I get it.
John: You're asking stupid, obvious questions.
John: But where's my point of engagement?
John: Yeah, sure.
John: So all of that, as we realize that stuff and understand it, we're trying to modify how we do.
John: But it happens so far back.
John: that there's no way other, you know, other than having the schools and, and, you know, having schools be this, this overarching agency that's actually in people's homes, you know, that you can't, it's hard to tailor a system of education that serves everybody.
John: And how do you, and the testing thing notwithstanding, like I feel like
John: I feel like judging a school system on how well students do on tests is just end time shit.
John: And it's the opposite of education.
John: And it drives me bananas.
John: Maybe it's teaching.
John: Maybe it is teaching kids to be good at law school.
John: But I feel like we don't need that many lawyers.
John: We need fewer lawyers and more book readers.
John: We have plenty of lawyers, in other words.
John: I love lawyers.
John: Don't get me wrong.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But, I mean, I would say.
Merlin: I would say more like, you know, maybe doctors, maybe more like doctors.
Merlin: Maybe that's what we're trying to make with all this testing.
Merlin: But no, but a lawyer, like part of being, it seems to me that part of being a lawyer, and there's a reason, I suppose, that so many of my friends from fancy liberal arts school became attorneys.
Merlin: And it wasn't just because of their love of the law or the desire to be a judge or, you know.
Merlin: in the fullness of time for most people giving up and becoming a teacher of law.
Merlin: But that happened really quickly in some cases.
Merlin: But no, it's because there was something very attractive about law school to people who had read a lot and thought a lot and worked independently and had to figure out relatively impossible amounts of work over a period of time.
Merlin: So if anybody was like a ding-a-ling like me would sit down and go, I have 1,600 pages of reading this week.
Merlin: I better get started and make coffee.
Merlin: It doesn't hurt.
Merlin: But then there's another way of saying, well, like, how do we...
Merlin: I feel like hack on this to figure out, OK, what is the one?
Merlin: And I'm not even any good at this.
Merlin: I'm not a lawyer.
Merlin: But like there's a certain kind of thinking you have to do to go like, how do I find the like 20 percent of this that is going to be hugely important to getting the most important part of this done?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So as a lawyer, you might go into a case, it seems to me, and say like, like if I treat every datum.
Merlin: in these many, many piles of banker boxes, if I treat all of these data as equally important, I'm going to be screwed.
Merlin: I'm going to have to find some way to quickly, almost like a sorting algorithm, I'm going to have to find some way to get the gist of a bunch of this fairly quickly.
Merlin: The trick I taught my daughter, the trick about estimating, where you take a big pile of stuff, you break it into N divisions that look equivalent.
Merlin: You know this old trick, right?
Merlin: So you can take all of your change, for example, and there are websites that can help you do this, but you can weigh your change to basically find out how much it's worth.
Merlin: But if you take a giant amount of your change, break it into 10... It works astonishingly well.
Merlin: That's one of my favorite Bad Company songs.
What?
Merlin: Do you know about this?
Merlin: You go and you take a bunch of your change and you grab a certain amount of it and you count up.
Merlin: Well, no, however much arbitrarily you say like, OK, in this two fists worth, there are this many quarters, this many dimes, this mean nickels, this many pennies.
Merlin: and then you weigh how much is in the jar, and it's astonishingly close.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah, because you're taking this random sampling of your own, and it's not perfect, but even if you're getting 1% of the change that's in there, if it's a fair sampling, you're not just cherry-picking quarters, it is astonishingly good.
Merlin: She's learned that trick.
Merlin: Okay, here's the thing.
John: Do you say penny or penny?
John: I say penny, I think.
John: Do you know anybody that says penny?
John: I don't know.
John: I'll find out.
Merlin: But I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that this is an amazingly useful skill like that.
Merlin: I don't remember learning things like this of like, you know what, if you want to figure out how many are in this set, you know, anybody can figure out half of something visually, like half, roughly half.
Merlin: Now, half of that, half of that, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: Count how many are in that amount and then multiply by how many piles there are.
Merlin: And it's going to be close enough most of the time.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Is that perfect?
Merlin: No, because this more procedural way that we're taught to do it is you count every fucking one because it's an American school and we're going to get this right.
Merlin: Memorize, memorize, memorize.
Merlin: Instead of going like, here's an estimation that's going to get you most of the way there in like a 20th of the time.
Merlin: So this is how a lawyer knows how to do.
John: And that's what a smart person knows how to do.
John: And it's one of those like read four sentences, go back and read the first sentence again type of thing.
John: Really, you should just be approaching like a law school student can read 1600 pages in four and a half hours.
John: And, you know, and I'm still on page 150 going like, now, wait a minute.
John: Let me go back to the dictionary.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I find myself doubting myself.
Merlin: I was just even I was reading a very accessible, very good book about language yesterday.
Merlin: And even because I was with my family at the beach, I would still have to keep going back and going like, I think I just missed.
Merlin: I kept feeling like I'd missed something.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Because if you don't read it straight through, you got to go back.
John: You got to go back.
John: Right.
John: And what that effectively did in certain ways was it like my feeling that to read a book half acidly.
John: left me with a dissatisfied feeling that I had not read every word in that book and understood it.
John: And therefore I, in some ways had done, it was worse to have read that book half acidly than to not have even read the book.
John: Like I did by reading that book poorly, I did the book a disservice.
John: And so to honor the book, I will not even begin to read it.
John: And that was a weird, that's a weird relationship to reading.
John: And I have, you know, I have, I have friends that have read like volumes and volumes and volumes.
John: And from where I'm coming from, they read it half acidly.
John: They never had that moment where they put the book down and went, Oh God, that was beautiful.
John: Right.
John: Or they like reading through a chapter.
John: They're just like, Oh my God, that was the most beautiful thing I ever read.
John: They're missing that they have to be.
Merlin: I mean, think about the way I have a friend who reads scripts at Lucasfilm.
Merlin: And, you know, anybody who reads films who's a producer, you think about that scene in The Producers, you know, where they're going through all the different scripts to find the terrible one.
Merlin: But, like, she knows, and Cordy's talked about this, like, she knows within, like, two to five pages pretty much, like, whether this is something she needs to keep reading.
Merlin: Because she's got so many scripts to read, she can't stop and sit and cry about the beauty of the plot of every one of them.
Merlin: Because she's got work to do.
Merlin: Think about being a book editor in New York City.
Merlin: Can you imagine that?
John: You know, stacks and stacks and stacks.
John: It's like you can't be reading these books.
Merlin: You've got to develop some kind of a heuristic, a set of heuristics for figuring out when something is worth spending your time on and then quickly sussing out how much time before you reassess how much time you should spend.
John: I mean, not to bring this back to Carl Ove.
John: But I mean, how many, how many pages of a guy recounting basically minute by minute what his boring childhood was, was like, how many of those, how much, but you know, but to put the book down and say, I can't keep doing this as opposed to just accelerating your pace and be like, uh-huh.
Merlin: Got to get through this.
Merlin: Got to get through this.
John: Got to get through this.
John: Flip.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: Still talking about that time in the kitchen where his dad wouldn't look at him.
John: Flip, flip, flip.
John: Right.
Merlin: Well, it depends on what you're there for.
Merlin: I mean, the same could be said, I guess, of like an Andy Warhol movie where you go into it knowing that it's going to be many, many hours long and seemingly deliberately boring.
Merlin: And so like you can either be there for that experience or you can get super frustrated about how dumb it is.
John: Well, and like the Craymaster cycle, are you watching that?
John: I'm not reading that for plot.
John: I'm not watching that for plot.
John: But if you're watching it and also looking at your phone and also chatting with your friend, are you watching it?
Merlin: I know, I know.
Merlin: I go through this with my lady friend because when I'm watching something really good...
Merlin: especially if it's got dragons and shit, I put everything down.
Merlin: I put everything down and I watch it.
Merlin: And if it's one of those, like, if it's like a Jodorowsky, anything like that, where it's an immersive, potentially disturbing experience, you know, there's going to be little things that are cuing you...
Merlin: to how important... I'm trying to arrive at something here, which is to say that, like, I think one problem with us as we get older is we rely more and more heavily on heuristics, shortcuts, eventually cliches, which can, of course, take you all the way down to, like, stabbing people in Sacramento because that's how you roll.
Merlin: You don't want to get too caught up in your guesses
Merlin: your fast guess about what something is.
Merlin: And yet, I think there's other kinds of heuristics that we don't think about actively.
Merlin: I know I don't think about actively enough.
Merlin: And it's something, you know, and how do you judge this?
Merlin: You think about something like a line like, well, you know, I don't have to eat a pound of dirt to know I don't want to eat dirt.
Merlin: Like the kind of thing you would say about in politics, like, oh, well, you just write this person off.
Merlin: And like, there's those kinds of heuristics that can be very dismissive.
Merlin: But like, for example, like if you walk into, you walking into a thrift store,
Merlin: I bet you've got an unconscious or even conscious set of heuristics for how much time to spend before you realize and recheck how much time to spend.
Merlin: You would never go, I'm going to look at every item in this entire store.
John: I could put it in a worksheet.
John: It could be one page long and there could be a quiz at the end.
Merlin: Give me a couple.
Merlin: Does it start outside?
Merlin: What begins the process of going, yeah, warm or cold?
Merlin: This is me.
Merlin: This is not me.
John: For me, you walk in, you're already moving fast, right?
John: You don't stand in the doorway of a thrift store and look around like a dummy.
John: You come in, you're moving fast.
John: You know that if this particular thrift store has already cherry picked what they think is the nice stuff, which they're usually wrong about.
John: But if they've already cherry-picked to a certain extent and put over in their little boutique area.
Merlin: I never thought of that before.
Merlin: That's so awful, but it's true.
Merlin: The stuff that's been chosen as high-value fashion stuff by people who work in the thrift store.
John: Exactly, right?
John: This is the first thing you need to know, that people in the back of a thrift store do not understand what is good.
John: But sometimes it's like weighing your change.
John: Sometimes they get it just right enough that you can't you can't blow past that thing and say no thanks.
John: You do have to go through it.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: But you can go through it pretty quickly.
John: I was standing in the thrift store one time listening to the little old ladies in the back room who were sorting stuff.
John: And one of them pulled out a tour T-shirt from like a late 70s journey tour.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: And it was— Like a baseball shirt?
John: Yeah, a fucking baseball shirt.
John: I would kill for that.
John: It was battered.
John: You know, this shirt was battered, but still intact and still beautiful.
Merlin: I'm still looking for a Van Halen, what was it, 79 Invasion shirt.
Merlin: I'm still looking for one of those.
John: Right.
John: So that shirt on Melrose is worth $250.
John: And in San Francisco, it's worth $150.
John: And on eBay, it's probably worth $90.
John: And this little old lady is like, well, what do you think, Marge?
John: Do you think that this is still wearable?
John: And Marge looks at it and goes, no, it's pretty worn out.
John: And I watch her toss it into a bin, which bin, I'm sure, is headed to either a fabric recycler.
John: It's going to become bath mats.
John: Bath mats, or it's going to go to the Ukraine, right?
John: There's a whole thing.
John: Maybe Ukraine, I said the Ukraine, I'm sorry.
John: No, he did it again.
John: He started writing it now, too.
John: It's going to, maybe it's, and I know that whoever is mad at me about saying the Ukraine is also going to be mad at me.
John: at the suggestion that old t-shirts are being delivered so let's go dude some kids gonna be don't stop believing he's gonna be so happy that's right but and i think maybe it ends up in uh in transylvania let's say transylvania because i've never gotten an angry email from anyone in transylvania
John: That's where Ken Stringfell is going to retire.
John: But I'm looking at it.
John: I'm looking at this thing go into this bin and I'm thinking I am not someone who's going to get that Journey T-shirt and sell it on eBay.
John: I'm just not.
John: And I don't care enough about it.
John: And Viacondios Journey T-shirt, like you blew it.
John: But I'm also thinking these ladies throw –
Merlin: So there's a heuristic for you is that there is a chance that there is some pearls among the oysters here.
Merlin: It happens every day.
John: But when I walk into a thrift store, I go through their boutique really fast.
John: And my number one heuristic is if you don't like the fabric...
John: of a thing it doesn't matter if it fits oh don't waste your time right so if you're walking through the thing and you're like does this fit does this fit does this fit you're that's you're screwed up you what you do is you run your you kind of walk down the aisle you run your fingers along everything you go to the size area so you say long sleeve shirts in your size no no no because tell me more those people in the back room don't know what sizes are either
John: They just don't.
John: And particularly because a lot of shirts that are nice are in European sizes and they're like 46.
John: I guess that means it's the same as a 14.
John: Maybe they put the decimal point the wrong place.
John: You know, stuff is everywhere all the time.
John: Sometimes I go over and look in the extra large women's stuff because they look at a blazer that's an unusual color and they go, this must be a girl's blazer.
John: And they put it in extra large women's.
John: That's so weird.
John: You have to imagine.
Merlin: It's the color of your crystal and the granularity of your lens, like how you see the world.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It results in entirely different results.
John: A bin of other people's old shit arrives in the back room of a thrift store, and the people who have either anointed themselves or been transferred over into the sorter gang—
John: are just going through there with whatever their education is about clothes and about stuff.
John: And they're like, this goes here, this goes there, and they're often wrong.
John: So you just run your fingers over everything until you see something that jumps out at you as like, that's nice.
John: And then you take extra time with it and you say, this is going to fit.
John: Do I like this style?
John: And it's very different if you are looking for a black suit to go to a funeral because there's a lot of black suits and you have to kind of like, OK, I'm just confining myself to confining myself to these black suits.
John: But for me, I can walk through there really fast and just like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
John: I know that I'm not going to.
John: go through the every button down shirt in the store looking for the one that jumps out at me because I can just go I can I can go almost at a walking pace with with my middle finger just grazing over everything looking for the moment that I hit something that's like that feels good or that fabric's unusual or you know and then almost just as quickly you can pull the thing out
John: Look at it and say, is that going to fit me?
John: Yay or nay?
John: Then you look at it and you go nay.
John: And if you look at the tag only, you will be wrong about a third of the time because the tag is going to say medium.
John: And then you look at the shirt and you're like, this is not a medium.
John: Clearly, it's not a medium.
John: It's bigger than all of its neighbors.
John: You know, like it is a mistake.
Merlin: Sizes, even on garments you pick up brand new, really feel like there are two standard deviations.
Merlin: Like I bought a sweater not long ago that's a large that after one washing feels smaller than a medium.
Merlin: There's not much to really bank on except your ability to like go pick it up and try it yourself.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
John: So I hit all that stuff, right?
John: I barely look at pants because really a man needs three pairs of pants.
John: And I don't need to go through a thrift store and wear some other guy's pants.
John: But I do go through the shoes.
John: And again, it's a thing where the thrift store is full of square-toed shoes because square-toed shoes are from the 90s or from the 2000s or something.
John: And you don't want a pair of square-toed shoes.
John: If you have a pair of square-toed shoes that you bought back then that you're still wearing –
John: That's great.
John: You're still wearing the shoes that you bought then.
John: But you're not going to go buy somebody else's throwaway square-toed shoes.
John: And you can walk through the shoe section and go, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
John: And then every once in a while, it's rare, but you see a pair of shoes in the shoes that you're like, these are used shoes, already a problematic notion.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: But this shoe is singing to me somehow.
John: And only then do you see if it fits.
John: And then I go back to the luggage and with the luggage, I'm not even touching stuff.
John: I'm just looking with my eyes because what I'm looking for is a certain kind of bag, which is to say old and soft.
Merlin: You're not looking for like the plastic, the red plastic Samsonites.
John: I don't want a Samsonite.
John: I don't want somebody's old trumpet case because I have 14 of those already.
John: I don't want a hat box.
John: You know, I'm looking for someone's duffel that someone's, you know, old small duffel that they used maybe when they shipped out to Singapore or
John: Or maybe they used it as a gym bag back in the day when they belonged to an athletic club.
John: But I can see it with my eye, right?
John: And so I'm moving through there and then I'm moving through the blankets looking for a Hudson's Bay blanket or a mohair, some kind of wool blanket made by an American or Canadian or English mill.
John: Yeah.
John: And again, those are not fleece blankets.
John: Those are not comforters.
John: Those are not blankets knitted by your grandmother.
John: They're a certain kind of thing.
John: And you can feel them with your finger.
John: You just run your finger along there.
John: You're like, that blanket's too soft, too soft, too soft.
John: Oh, that one feels uncomfortable.
John: Let's look at it.
John: Because with a blanket, you want something that looks and feels uncomfortable because those are the best ones.
John: A blanket that might at one point have been on a horse.
John: And then if there's plenty of time, right?
John: Half the time, I'm already out of the thrift store by this point.
John: But if there's plenty of time, you go look at the cufflinks and the wallets and the belt buckles.
Merlin: And again, this is stuff that they... You don't dawdle in that section of various souvenir wood items that somehow always have their own aisle in a thrift store?
Merlin: I got all of the in and out boxes I need.
John: You know what I'm talking about, though?
Merlin: This could be also things...
Merlin: roughly making a sculpture of something that looks like a person out of tiny seashells.
Merlin: You've got spoons.
Merlin: All of the stuff that was made in wood shop class, pencil holders.
Merlin: So strange.
Merlin: That area feels the most disturbing.
Merlin: Like if I were going to try and trick out the set of a movie to really look like a serial killer was there, I would get all of those items.
John: Well, right, like the monkey that's carved out of a coconut.
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: Somebody will definitely want to use this.
John: Yeah, or also the aisle where it's just 1,500 wall warts for different electronic devices that don't exist anymore.
Merlin: You have a cascade of these that it sounds like is somewhat conscious, but you don't have to think about it much.
Merlin: You know you don't have to think about each shirt.
Merlin: You run your hand along.
Merlin: You have a whole cascade of ways you blow through one of these places.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: But I'm guessing there are also things where you can even – you can get a vibe sometimes about a place where you go, that's not going to be good.
Merlin: Yeah, you walk in the door and you smell it.
Merlin: It doesn't take long.
No.
No.
Merlin: There's some photos that Dan has been sending me over time starting in March.
Merlin: And it's this place, you know, Dan gets very bewildered.
Merlin: He has concerns about things.
Merlin: He gets very bewildered.
Merlin: He likes to send photos of things.
Merlin: He does.
John: And it's not always clear what the photos are.
Merlin: Not sure what it is or why he's sending it.
Merlin: Yeah, that's a thing.
Merlin: No, but he started sending this to me in March.
Merlin: Because, you know, Dan gets concerns about things.
Merlin: We call it Dan's concern on the show.
Merlin: So Dan had a concern about this place across the street from his office.
Merlin: It's this place that has Japanese food.
Merlin: I won't say the name of it, but it says sushi, ramen, soba.
Merlin: So they're in what looks like...
Merlin: You ever been someplace where there's not really a front?
Merlin: Everything feels like the back, no matter where you are.
Merlin: This is one of those places.
John: Okay, I get it, I get it.
Merlin: The San Francisco Zoo feels like this.
Merlin: No matter where you go in the San Francisco Zoo, you feel like you're behind wherever you're supposed to actually be.
Merlin: Is there a front to this?
John: In a Japanese restaurant, there would be that curtain between you and the kitchen, but you'd feel like you're on the wrong side of the curtain.
Merlin: In this case, this is from outside.
Merlin: There's a tree, a beautiful tree, blocking the entire front of this place.
Merlin: But it basically looks like a combination of a cross between a warehouse and one of those all-you-can-eat-soup-and-salad places.
Merlin: It's got an awning, but it looks very much like the back door.
Merlin: There's lots of, like, utility boxes.
Merlin: They had a sign-up for the place.
Merlin: Then they added a second sign to the other side of the house.
Merlin: Other side of the building.
Merlin: Then they put Christmas lights around the sign out front.
John: Right.
Merlin: To that, they then added... Hello, hello, hello.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: To that, they then added a Costco open-close sign.
Merlin: To that, they then added a lamp in addition to that.
Merlin: And the thing is, but watching this progress now for, you know, whatever, three, four months, it's so depressing because they are doing something they think is working.
Merlin: They think they're helping...
Merlin: tease the heuristic a little bit by putting up more signs and more Christmas.
Merlin: And every piece of shit look at me thing that they add to this makes this more a place I would never in a million years go into.
Merlin: They're trying to stimulate in their mind, they're like, why is no one coming here?
Merlin: We've got all these signs and Christmas lights.
Merlin: Why is no one coming here for food that is definitely totally fresh?
John: If I owned a restaurant, I've thought about this.
John: If I owned a restaurant, I would have a very difficult time not over-accessorizing it.
John: like a cracker barrel well no not quite that but i wouldn't like there wouldn't be any plows no bennegan's kind of street signs and stuff but like i i also i too would maybe not know when to stop with open signs
Merlin: Because you finally own a restaurant.
Merlin: You got to put all of them up.
John: I'd find one at an auction that was like a cool old vintage open sign and I'd put it in there and then I'd be like, wow, you know what?
John: A barber pole.
John: Like...
John: More signage.
John: Yeah, maybe I should call this place Barber's or Supercuts.
John: JJ Poles.
John: And pretty soon, yeah, it would be like a McGinnikins, a McGinnikinicalies, where I just had my waiters all had garters on their sleeves and were on roller skates.
John: And I'd be like, you know, you're only wearing 15 pieces of flair.
John: You're just here to do a minimum job or you're going to go the whole distance.
John: Like I would be – I'm afraid of being in retail or in restaurants mostly for that reason.
John: You would not be able to know.
John: I wouldn't know when to quit and every day – because you go into restaurants sometimes and they're like beautiful minimalist places.
Merlin: Somebody has really thought about it.
Merlin: I was like my lady friend in college used to say.
Merlin: Her advice for most women was take out all the makeup that you want to use tonight and then put away half of it and you will look really, really good.
Merlin: Most people after their own devices will do too much of these things.
Merlin: And if it's like a one-person-owned place –
Merlin: Oh, there's a place near my college.
Merlin: I'm always using this as an example because it's so salient to me.
Merlin: It was this guy who had bought, you know, you get a place like, oh, your dentist's office used to be a pizza hut, that kind of thing.
Merlin: He bought a place that used to be a chain burger place and made it his own.
Merlin: Your dentist did.
Merlin: Well, no, no, this is a guy who made a burger place of an old burger place.
Merlin: Oh, I get you.
Merlin: Now, there are a couple distinctive things.
Merlin: You walk in there, and first of all, the lighting is not that of a national chain.
Merlin: He's really, really not spending a lot on keeping this place up to the standard of even a McDonald's.
Merlin: Another thing you notice, and you think about, this is like a dream, I swear to God, John.
Merlin: Imagine walking into a fast food place, and at the counter, there's one person working there.
Merlin: That person has a large console color TV behind the counter.
Merlin: and is sitting in a reclining chair like a lazy boy behind the counter.
Merlin: And you'd walk in there.
Merlin: Now, this is all pretty interesting, but then it gets super interesting because every burger, every sandwich, everything that this man made...
Merlin: If you just got the standard sandwich, the standard burger, he always, always, always put a fried egg on it unless you asked him not to.
Merlin: And he might seem a little hurt that you didn't want the fried egg.
Merlin: He had his own fucking restaurant with a lazy boy chair.
Merlin: And every sandwich got a fried egg on it unless you ordered otherwise.
Merlin: And to me, in my head, that's still always been the canonical example of like, what can go slightly wrong if there's nobody else there to tell you how this should work?
John: Yeah, right.
John: He's like, look, I like a fried egg on everything.
Merlin: He doesn't even say you want a fried egg on that, right?
Merlin: That's my thing.
Merlin: It's more like, no, I mean, it might as well be like he could have put fishing lures or brochures on there.
Merlin: That's just the thing he does.
John: Well, but the flip side of that is the people that don't know anything that are like, I'm opening a restaurant.
John: I'm going to put a chili burger on the restaurant.
John: When somebody orders it, I'm going to spread chili on the bun like it's a condiment.
Yeah.
John: Because I read about it in restaurateur magazine or somebody showed me sandwiches as though they've never actually eaten a sandwich.
Merlin: It's the bane of my existence.
John: Who?
John: Who?
John: This is the other one.
John: I'll have a chili burger, please.
John: And then the burger comes and it's got lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise and pickles on it.
John: Oh, and then like a cup of chili on the side?
John: Or like chili on the bun.
John: Chili on the other bun.
John: And then all this other stuff.
John: Like, do they not have chili burgers in your town?
John: Or are you a fucking ufo?
Merlin: My neighborhood?
Merlin: Like, it's exactly the same kind of thing.
Merlin: And this is all part of my heuristic now, is I can sniff out, basically.
Merlin: I go in there.
Merlin: You're a coffee place, right?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: You're a coffee place.
Merlin: I'm sure you get real fancy coffee.
Merlin: Oh, and look at this.
Merlin: You do breakfast sandwiches.
Merlin: Shh.
Merlin: You know what the breakfast sandwich in my neighborhood is?
Merlin: You get your egg, you get some cheese, you get a meat, and then all of the other things that you would put on a lunchtime sandwich.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Lettuce, tomato, sprouts.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: No, no, exactly.
Merlin: This is like me trying to go out and make Szechuan, where I would have no idea what to make because I've eaten it, but I don't know how to cook it.
Merlin: But, like, who puts that?
Merlin: But everybody in the neighborhood does it.
Merlin: You have to go in and go, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: I don't want tomato on my egg sandwich for breakfast.
Merlin: Sprouts.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Sprouts.
Merlin: No, don't make me a ham, cheese, and bologna sandwich with sprouts, lettuce, and mayonnaise.
Merlin: Like, you're making me so sad.
Merlin: What?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And I feel like there are people that go into being in restaurants because it seems like a good job.
John: Like, I'm going to start a restaurant because it seems like a thing for a person to do.
John: Everybody's got to eat.
John: Right?
John: Instead of somebody that's like, I've always wanted to have a restaurant because I have a passion.
John: Oh.
Merlin: And because you've like been through the business of it and like that's when you're talking about like, you know, the kind of restaurant where you're going like, oh, this is nice.
Merlin: Like they notice things like they notice that they don't ask you if you want more water.
Merlin: They give you more water because no one has never nobody has ever not wanted water.
John: If you drank the water in the glass already.
John: Yeah.
John: You know what?
John: Here's a tip.
John: You have demonstrated that you're a water drinker.
John: Probably not thirsty.
John: Like I drink water.
John: I have drunk water.
John: You want more lettuce on your egg sandwich?
John: Here's my idea for a restaurant, and I feel like... I got one for you, too.
John: My daughter and I invented one this weekend.
John: Let me hear yours.
John: All right, here's my idea.
John: It would be like the soup guy in the Seinfeld show.
John: Okay.
John: Except it would have three big food service-sized giant cooking pots right behind... It's a very small restaurant.
John: Just a railroad-sized restaurant.
John: Three big pots.
John: One has macaroni and cheese in it.
John: One has chili in it.
John: One has stew in it.
John: Oh, my God.
John: They never change.
John: It's the three pots.
John: Stew, chili, mac and cheese.
Merlin: And you decide.
Merlin: Obviously, the second thing is you can get a big bunch of it to go.
Merlin: The first thing is, how many items?
Merlin: It's like going to Panda Express.
Merlin: Do you want one, two, or three items?
Merlin: That's right.
John: One, two, or three.
Merlin: And that's it.
John: That's it.
John: Every day.
John: So every day it's just like if you don't want macaroni and cheese, stew, or chili, go to a different restaurant.
John: But if you want any one of those things or all three of those things, here we are.
John: And for five bucks, you get a thing of one of those things.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I would be there so much.
Merlin: Here's ours.
Merlin: This is based on the way that my daughter and I increasingly eat pizza.
Merlin: It's a new restaurant called Toppers.
Merlin: You go in there, and we give you melted cheese with toppings on it but no pizza.
Merlin: Wouldn't you love to be able to go and enjoy pizza without having to eat fucking pizza?
John: Just have the top of a... It's just like that place that... I guess it's another Seinfeld episode about the muffin tops.
Merlin: Oh, the muffin tops.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I've had other ideas.
Merlin: I've had other ideas for places that are just gravies.
Merlin: It's just gravies and sauces and then things to put it on.
Merlin: That's when you and I retire, which we can, of course, never afford to do.
Merlin: But if we do... You know what?
Merlin: This would be a chance for our listeners to support us.
Merlin: Help us start the restaurant chain.
John: Gravy McSaucingtons.
John: Merlin and John.
John: And it'll be, we'll have like, we'll be like Bartles and James.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: We'll be in the commercials.
Merlin: But we need a cool name, though.
Merlin: Maybe cover band.
Merlin: It's got to have a name that incorporates the sauce idea.
John: You don't think you'd just call it Gravy's?
John: Cover me.
John: Or just call it FX McGravies.
Yeah.
Merlin: I like J.J.
Merlin: as like a J.J.
Merlin: McGraveyman.
John: Oh, J.J.
John: McGraveyman.
John: But you like J.J.
John: because he did that incomprehensible television show that no one should ever watch.
Merlin: J.J.
Merlin: Arms?
John: Yeah, J.J.
Merlin: J.J.
John: Arms or J.J.
John: Abrams?
John: J.J.
John: McNoplop.
John: No, oh, J.J.
Merlin: Abrams is the one with all the spaceships?
Merlin: He made a Star Wars, and then you got J.J.
Merlin: Arms, who was the private detective that had Hook's rants.
Merlin: Now, if J.J.
Merlin: Arms could come in and be the spokesperson for our gravy's restaurants.
Merlin: J.J.
Merlin: McGravies.
Merlin: J.J.
Merlin: McGravies.
Merlin: It's hooky.
John: J.J.
John: McArms.
John: What was the television show where there was a ghost monster and people were in and out of a sleigh stack?
Merlin: Oh, it's called Houseman.
Merlin: It's a big house.
Merlin: Sorority boy.
Merlin: What's it called?
Merlin: I know the one you mean.
Merlin: Ghost house.
John: Ghost.
John: Well, no, it was a ghost airplane that crashed onto an island.
Merlin: Lost.
Merlin: Lost.
Merlin: Oh, I thought you were talking about his one after that.
Merlin: Dollhouse is what I was thinking.
Merlin: No, no, who am I thinking of?
Merlin: I'm thinking of Joss Whedon.
Merlin: Joss Whedon.
Merlin: J.J.
Merlin: Abrams made Alias.
Merlin: J.J.
Merlin: Abrams made Lost.
Merlin: And I think J.J.
Merlin: Abrams made My So-Called Life.
Merlin: Oh, I get it.
Merlin: You just said J.J.
Merlin: Abrams made Lost.
Merlin: What did I say?
Merlin: Yeah, J.J.
Merlin: Abrams.
Merlin: Joss Whedon didn't make that at all.
Merlin: Oh, Joss Whedon didn't make Lost?
Merlin: No, I think Joss Whedon, J.J.
Merlin: Abrams, I think.
Merlin: Let's see here.
John: See, I keep seeing Joss Whedon at, like, Comic-Con and stuff.
Merlin: Will Whedon.
Merlin: Oh, Will Whedon.
Merlin: Whedon.
Merlin: Will Whedon.
Merlin: We still didn't talk about Morris dancing.
Merlin: I don't even know what that is.
Merlin: Next time.