Ep. 230: "Forest of Meat"
John: Hello.
John: Hey, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Super good.
John: Oh, you sound good.
John: Yeah, thanks.
John: I'm broadcasting live from Venice, California.
Merlin: You sound like you have good internet today.
John: Oh, that's good.
John: You sound clear.
Merlin: You sound like you're in a cathedral.
Merlin: Oh, well, you know what it is, I think?
Merlin: I've got a little natural reverb.
Merlin: Oh, it's got a nice crisp report to it.
Merlin: Oh, a crisp report.
Merlin: Kapow!
Merlin: I like this.
Merlin: You sound good.
Merlin: It's like the short happy life of Francis McCumber.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: Now, is that the abortion one?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: That's like elephants.
Merlin: Maybe I'll try on this episode.
Merlin: Maybe I'll try to make it sound good.
John: You're talking about you're going to try on your end?
Merlin: Performance, I think, we could take that as read.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I'm always here.
Merlin: I'm in the moment.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: People don't like when they can hear me typing.
Merlin: I think my typing has gotten louder.
Merlin: How can that be?
Merlin: Well, you know, I'm not using my clicky keyboard.
Merlin: I'm using my non-clicky keyboard, but a little bit of, as they say, inside baseball.
Merlin: Sometimes, you know, I'm writing things down that you've said that are funny.
Merlin: Oh, you mean clicking?
Merlin: I live the electronic lifestyle now.
John: Oh, I don't even know the TV.
John: Is that what you tell panhandlers?
Merlin: Do you accept a Bitcoin?
Merlin: But, you know, I'm putting the show together while the show's happening.
Merlin: Everything that happens on the show is on the show.
John: Yeah, that's true.
John: That's true.
John: As I said when I just typed you, I said there might be some electronical troubleshooting, but you know that always makes for...
John: For great radio.
Merlin: Great radio.
Merlin: So you're in Venice.
Merlin: I'm cold here.
Merlin: My office is 63.9 degrees.
Merlin: That's insane.
Merlin: Well, sometimes if I run the dehumidifier, it heats it up a little bit.
John: Yeah.
John: It's the middle of winter.
John: Why should it be cold?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I live a very primitive modern life.
Merlin: So like my office, without saying too much, I have a heater, but it's kind of on the other side of the office and it doesn't really reach me.
Merlin: So it mostly really heats up the area right by the door where I'm not.
Merlin: Have you tried a space heater?
Merlin: I haven't.
Merlin: I feel like they might be a dangerous scam.
John: Oh, interesting.
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: That's one of those things where I feel like I need to really read up on it because I've reached that age in life where I worry about electricity.
John: Well, let me just save you a little bit of that reading up.
John: Okay, thank you.
John: There's a kind of space heater which is effectively like a radiator, like a...
John: Like a water radiator.
Merlin: It looks like a big accordion.
John: Yeah, it looks like a big accordion.
John: And inside is some sort of fluid.
John: I'm guessing, you know, some sort of whale oil.
John: But it's completely sealed within.
John: And then the electrical element just heats up the...
John: liquid, and it radiates just like a radiator would.
Merlin: It's a kind of sane, second-order heat.
Merlin: It's not that kind of heat where it's basically like a big hairdryer.
John: It's not that crazy dry heat.
John: There's no element of it where if you knocked it over, it would catch paper on fire.
John: It's just a big tall, you know, it's just a big sort of metal accordion that
John: That just sort of, you know, radiates this very comfortable, already mitigated heat.
John: It's already been mitigated by the fluid.
Merlin: I would love a mitigated heat.
Merlin: Yes, exactly.
Merlin: There's a phrase I like a lot that I use occasionally.
Merlin: I want to take the edge off.
Merlin: I don't need the place to be hot.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I just need it to be less cold.
Merlin: I think there's a difference.
John: So this is a very much, the edge is way off of this heat.
John: I have one that I use in, you've been to my home.
John: I have.
John: You know that there's a secondary wing, what I call the other wing.
John: And that wing, when I first moved into the house.
John: This is like the room under the stairs?
John: Yeah, but this is the room next to, no, the room under the stairs doesn't qualify as a wing because it's.
Merlin: Oh, that's really more part of the thorax.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It's in the house.
John: Okay.
John: Whereas the wing is the room adjacent to that, which is like not part of the house.
John: You open the door and you go in and there's a whole other world in there.
Hmm.
John: That room.
Merlin: But that, sometimes if it's not in the thorax, it's not benefiting from the nascent heat of the bird house.
John: Oh, pretty small.
John: Right?
John: When that wing was added to the house, the furnace...
John: The HVAC hookup was also added after thought.
John: The plumbing was added.
John: And every time I let something go down the sink, let's say, I imagine the way it must travel all the way back to where it goes into the city drain.
Merlin: I never used to think about these things, and now I think about it.
Merlin: Was it somebody in your family?
Merlin: I feel like it was somebody in your family a few generations back who worried about the electricity coming out of outlets.
Merlin: Wasn't it somebody... I think that was you, but somebody, a friend of mine, was saying how one of their older relatives some generations back worried about the electricity escaping from an outlet and getting introduced into the house.
John: No, my people were very practical about scientific matters, and no one had any superstition.
Merlin: You've had practical science in your family for a while now.
John: Just as I say it, I realize...
John: There is no superstition in my family at all in any direction.
Merlin: There's no, it seems like there's not a lot of, well, there might be magic like Disney magic or the magic of Christmas, but it seems like you don't have a lot of magical thinking in your family.
Merlin: There's a lot of crackpot thinking.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: That's, that's a nice distinction.
John: And some of it does extend to the spiritual realm.
John: Hmm.
John: To the world of causality?
John: No, no, literally to the world of spirits.
John: But I think it's more that it has to do with the cycle of life and whether or not the cycle of life is monitored properly.
John: Or whether the cycle of life is, you know, whether it's whether there's an uncaused cause, whether whether it's a it's a clockwork, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of like kooky.
John: let's say, kooky theory, kook theory, as we say.
John: For those of us, for those listeners who are currently at universities, it's a new discipline, kook theory.
John: So yeah, but there's no, you know, no one in my family would ever hear a creak in the house.
John: And I think I'm the only one, maybe my sister too, but no one would hear a creak in the house and think it's a ghost.
John: No one would, you know, my mom would not hesitate to walk across a cemetery on a moonless, windy night.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: Bring it on.
Merlin: Bring it on, says mom.
John: Yeah, she's on this side of the cemetery.
John: She's got to get to that side of the cemetery.
John: It's the quickest way, you know?
John: So there's not a ton of like...
John: That kind of woo-woo.
John: But if you say to my mom, do you believe in karma?
John: Yes.
John: Now, who's running the karma machine?
John: I don't know.
John: Right.
John: She doesn't care who's running the karma machine, but she believes people will get theirs.
Right.
Merlin: You know, people get pretty wound up in thinking less about the karma and more about the machine and its operator.
Merlin: That's another nice distinction.
John: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
John: That's right.
John: And, you know, my mom is a big proponent of reincarnation.
Merlin: Yeah, you told me this.
John: Yeah, but not interested in the operation of the mechanism.
John: Oh, I love this.
John: It's just a feature just as the wind or just as the mountains or the earth revolving around the sun.
John: It's like...
John: Yeah, there's a mechanism.
John: Do you know that phrase, cargo cults?
Merlin: I love it.
John: Cargo cults?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There was a band called Cargo Cult.
Merlin: Well, I mean, the way I've heard this...
Merlin: And who knows, this could be a turns out or a double turns out.
Merlin: But the way I've heard this explained was that there was a point, I think, after World War II, where the United States was delivering a lot of aid to, as the story, I'm just going to say as the story goes.
Merlin: So I'm not going to edit this for our times.
Merlin: But basically, there were...
Merlin: Marshal plan aid or other kind of like... It might have been even sooner, but the basic idea was that there were people on very remote islands dotted around the Pacific who needed a lot of help after the war.
Merlin: And these were delivered by very large cargo planes.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And so on a...
Merlin: On a fairly periodic basis, a giant plane would land, and these men in uniforms with headphones would appear and come and bring food and medicine and all different kinds of supplies.
Merlin: And the story goes that in some of these places, this became a kind of...
Merlin: I guess religion, where basically they started making headphones out of coconuts to please the gods, where they started making out of like fronds would make the equivalent of like a bee.
Merlin: What's the supply plane?
Merlin: Like a bee.
Merlin: At the time?
Merlin: Like a big plane.
Merlin: They'll make a big plane out of fronds.
John: Yeah, let's call it a, you know, what would they have been?
John: It would have been a DC-4.
Merlin: Okay, yeah.
Merlin: But the way we get to this, though, is that the story goes that these visits came and people started believing that it was their worship of the gods and the sort of totems that they made that were pleasing the gods and kept them coming back.
Merlin: I would prove that this is true.
Merlin: Then the story, of course, the turn is that for years after those planes stopped coming, people continued
Merlin: to make the idols they thought they were doing something wrong oh dear because now the planes it seems like you could have solved like so many things you could have solved that with better communications but that's the story and so that's a phrase people use a lot to explain where why there's something we end up doing and we're not sure exactly how we started doing it that way and especially in like programming they call it cargo culting and it's just this idea that like like well why do we why do we always do it this one way well that's the way we've always done it and like we haven't died of starvation yet so it must be working
John: I'm very curious about the way this exact kind of analogy makes its way into computer people talk.
John: Yeah.
John: Because it seems like every few weeks it is revealed to me, and maybe all these things have been all, maybe people have been, you know, analogizing this as a cargo cult for 25 years.
John: But it seems to me every few months I'm a new sort of...
John: analogistic syllogism um arrives where uh somehow in the in the software business someone says oh well you know you've heard the phrase um you you've heard the phrase the uh the arctic sandworm haven't you and i'm like what's the arctic sand yeah that's that's big right now a lot of people are thinking about the arctic sand the arctic sandworm is this you know it's a little bit of a mixed metaphor but
Merlin: Well, I mean, the idea of the Arctic sandworm is if you go somewhere that's very, very cold, it's going to look like one contiguous sheet of cold and ice.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Which, that seems logical.
Merlin: But.
Merlin: Turns out.
John: Should I continue?
John: Is this a double turns out?
John: And what I don't understand is somewhere, because a lot of the software engineers that I know are not, I don't know, like how would they know about a cargo cult?
John: Let's just put it that way.
John: But somewhere out there, I mean, how do I not know about a cargo cult?
John: That seems right in my wheelhouse.
John: That is right in your wheelhouse, yeah.
John: But somewhere out there, there is someone who is trying to...
John: analogize a computer problem or a systems problem, who also has in their experience knowledge of cargo cults, something fairly arcane, and then also has the type of mind to relate the two together in order to create a new turn of phrase.
Merlin: Yeah, well, I think this in some ways goes back to a lot of jargon, like where jargon comes from.
Merlin: And, you know, this is kind of a simplistic way to look at this, but when you're trying to talk about something like a business model...
Merlin: involving software and services, it can seem probably a little bit dry, a little bit gray.
Merlin: You want a way to physicalize or put into the real world what it is that you're talking about.
Merlin: And so you end up borrowing almost like loan words and phrases and stories.
Merlin: And sometimes they are, as they say, very sticky, which is another piece of jargon.
Merlin: So you get something like a cargo cult.
Merlin: Yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: Another one might be
Merlin: A classic piece of jargon from the late 90s was boiling the ocean.
Merlin: Are you familiar with that one?
John: You have used the phrase boiling the ocean before.
John: See, a lot of this jargon, by the time it gets to me... It's already a joke.
John: Yeah, you've already been using it for a long time, and the first time I hear it, you are already putting a ton of, like, ironic spin on it.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I'm like, boiling, why is boiling the, I think that's hilarious, boiling the ocean, and you're like, ah, yes, because the way you communicate it to me, it already contains the voices of the people who have said it to you that you have contempt for.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, you're right.
Merlin: And part of that, I think, comes out of having sat through, back in the day, having sat through so many meetings and lunches and just conversations you overhear where there are these certain kinds of things that sound very lively at first, these bits of jargon.
Merlin: Because they really capture a certain idea.
Merlin: Yeah, you don't try to boil the ocean here, Merlin.
Merlin: I mean, I'm trying to think of a good example of this, but I think, for example, there was for a time, like, for example, before people knew better during the dot-com days, people did a lot of, sometimes there were what you might call a pure digital play where you might say, hey, look, we're going to make this new way of like finding information.
Merlin: But a lot of times as things got a little more ambitious, you get like a pets.com.
Merlin: And so you get pets.com, and you say, well, we don't really have anything yet, but what we're going to have is this thing where you can get a 40-pound bag of dog food delivered to your house.
Merlin: And that's not just for pets.
Merlin: Well, it could be.
Merlin: I mean, if you're hungry enough, anything's food, you know?
Merlin: But this came up a lot at the place where I work, which is a realestate.com.
Merlin: And so the Boil the Ocean idea is pretty much what it sounds like, which is that this crazy idea we have for a business will work as long as an improbably large number of people that we have no reason to believe would ever do this, do this for way more money than we expected and for way longer than we expected.
Merlin: And we're going to put a tremendous amount of effort in.
Merlin: For example, let's say you're going to spend all this time doing research on every person in the United States and sending them exactly the right amount of coupon for something where you're still losing money on every order.
Merlin: You're describing the business model of indie rock, too.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: We should talk about that.
Merlin: Because of the demos, the demos.
Merlin: So I don't know if I'm putting that particularly well, but like that, you get things like open the kimono, which is the way of saying I'm going to speak openly about this as though I was showing you my dick in a rope.
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: The first time you said open the kimono to me, it came in the middle of, I think maybe at the time you were talking into your wallet.
Merlin: Yeah, that was me.
John: That was me.
Merlin: That was when I used to be Merlin Mann.
John: And I was like, yeah, when you were Merlin Mann.
John: And I said, wow, open the kimono.
John: And you know what it made me think of was Hawkeye Pierce and B.J.
John: Honeycutt standing in a, they were on leave in Seoul.
Merlin: Well, they were standing by their still.
Merlin: Oh, you're talking about when they would wear a literal, they'd go to Tokyo or Seoul and they'd wear a literal kimono.
John: Yeah, they'd go to Tokyo for some massages.
Merlin: For R&R.
John: For R&R.
John: And they'd be wearing a kimono.
John: And so opening the kimono, obviously, like when I first heard it, it was shocking and titillating.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, the first time somebody said, who moved my cheese?
John: Uh-huh, yeah.
John: You know what?
John: You just did a really good Hawkeye impression right there.
Merlin: Uh-huh, yeah.
John: But I'm just curious because it's like I understand that business school is 98% just coming up with this type of thing because people are paying a lot of money to go to business school and nothing actually happens there except for the communication.
John: I got a lot of questions.
John: A lot of questions about business school.
John: It's kind of like who moved my cheese level of insight into the world.
John: But but I don't understand when the language is so colorful, when it's such a, you know, like cargo cult in and of itself is a fascinating reference to make once in your lifetime, you know, and it requires so much explanation as to what it is that it.
John: that its usefulness is also kind of predicated on an idea that this is a very small, inclusive culture.
John: Just to say cargo cult is also not just like a metaphor, but it's also a code that says... Oh, absolutely.
John: Absolutely.
John: Anybody that understands this has already read the Wikipedia page, and the only way they did that is that someone initiated them into the understanding of this representative language.
Merlin: Yeah, it becomes, it goes from being, so you have, like on a technical basis, you might have jargon, where there's certain kinds of things that people use as like a heuristic to get past a certain concept we all basically understand, but then it goes from jargon to being really more like a patois.
Merlin: Where, like, you can say these phrases, and it shows it's just like you're whatever your Brooks Brothers suit.
Merlin: It shows that you're part of the in-group when you're able to make the right reference at the right time.
Merlin: And, you know, go betide you if you make a reference that's too old, because that shows that you're not up on the latest.
John: Yeah, nobody is boiling the ocean these days.
John: But my curiosity is, where is that being generated?
John: Like, who are...
John: Because I know a lot of people in business.
John: Obviously, I don't know as many people in Internet business as you.
John: But they don't, in general, seem like language generators.
John: But somewhere in the machine, there are people who are frustrated poets.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, for sure.
John: Somehow using language this way and incorporating what they read into creating new language to describe processes.
John: I just love it, and I wish that there was some kind of – because it's like this is the etymology, right?
John: Yeah.
John: Someday some etymologist is going to have to –
John: is going to have to wade through all this, uh, beach grass to find like who, where did that come from?
John: You know?
John: And it, and, and something like cargo cult, it feels like it has an originator.
John: It's not something that just got into the parlance by, you know, the, like the same way that, um, uh,
John: So many of our phrases kind of come from Shakespeare, but get mangled on the way or from the Bible.
John: But this feels like one person used this the first time.
John: Right.
John: And they were so clever, but we don't have a record of...
Merlin: It's like he presented TED Talk Zero.
Merlin: It's the font from which so much of these mental models come from.
John: Right.
John: Not just the font, but also the font.
Merlin: And the found.
Merlin: Am I right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Absolutely right.
Merlin: You know, I think mental models can be very powerful.
Merlin: And, you know, there's that guy who wrote that book, Don't Think of an Elephant.
Merlin: Before that, he'd written, what's his name, Lakoff, had written a book called Metaphors We Live By.
Merlin: And his whole deal is, not whole deal, but a lot of what he talks about has to do with that metaphors are more than just a way of understanding a situation that's foreign to us or, you know, that we haven't experienced before.
Merlin: The metaphors actually become a way that get sort of ingrained in our thinking.
Merlin: So I don't know if mental model is exactly the right word, but life is a journey.
Merlin: There's basically all of these things.
Merlin: Don't move my cheese.
Merlin: Don't move my cheese.
Merlin: That's definitely one of them.
Merlin: But just the idea that I think what you're talking about here is that there's an idea that grabs you and you make some kind of a connection in your own head and go, oh, I get that joke or I understand that reference.
Merlin: And then it can be difficult to shake.
Merlin: And there are certain kinds of pithy, almost Shakespearean, rhythmic little bits of language that people say and repeat and repeat over and over again.
Merlin: And sometimes it might take a few months for it to catch on, but then it might take a decade for people to really kind of unpack, well, okay, well, what does that really mean?
Merlin: And does that heuristic still work as a way to explain the way things are happening right now?
John: Yeah, I mean, I imagine like a phrase like rat race.
John: There was a time when only people, I mean, you know, that probably came, you know, rat race is one of those things where it might have come from Elizabethan England when people actually were racing rats.
John: But it also could be a thing that entered the lexicon in the 50s when scientists were doing a lot of experiments on rats in mazes.
Merlin: I bet it's just the way that – I mean, who knows?
Merlin: Now, there's certainly going to be a double or triple or quadruple turns out here.
Merlin: But I imagine it's what it looks like when you watch a bunch of people moving through Manhattan.
Merlin: It looks like a bunch of rats racing.
John: Well, sure.
John: But in order to make the connection, I wonder if –
John: In its earliest stages, whether rat race was also a little bit of insider language in that you had to be educated enough to understand that scientists were like not not just observing humans in.
John: Like a – what am I – I'm trying to get like a – because we use – and we haven't done this in a long time, but like habit trails.
John: Do you remember when everybody – I love a habit trail.
John: When everybody had a habit trail and it was a very popular – That was peak hamster.
John: Yeah, a very popular analogy in its time to think of yourself as a hamster on a wheel or a hamster within a habit trail, which, you know, which meant that you were exploring your whole environment.
John: You had this whole environment you lived in, but you weren't cognizant of the fact that this was just a...
John: Yeah, and it was an ant farm, and that's another one.
John: But you don't use ant farm or habit trail references anymore because nobody has ant farms or habit trails like those fads have passed.
John: But I wonder, I mean, there are a lot of things I think that we use that the analogy was at one point in time sort of predicated on being a member of a much smaller group.
John: That understood that scientists were working on rats or that understood what a what a what some of these, you know, like hula hoops or whatever.
Merlin: Or like, I mean, like maybe a common one would be all the various spins on.
Merlin: Boy, now I'm going to have to remember words.
Merlin: Yeah, this is the problem for me, too.
Merlin: B.F.
Merlin: Skinner and Pavlov.
Merlin: So all the variations on like a pigeon pecking for a pellet, which is another kind of in some ways related to the cargo cult idea, or the idea of the Pavlovian response.
Merlin: Right, Pavlov's dog.
Merlin: Yeah, drooling like a, yeah, exactly.
John: And I remember first being introduced to that concept and having to have Pavlov explain to me
Merlin: That's a pretty gruesome experiment when you really read about it.
Merlin: You know about this?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: They weren't just sitting there with a shot glass trying to capture spittle.
Merlin: I think they actually cut a hole into the dog and then put like a spittle channel in there so they could capture it scientifically.
John: Well, you got to capture it scientifically.
Merlin: Yeah, that's why it says around a label, science.
John: Listen, if you can't find a reason to cut a hole into a dog, I don't think you're doing science.
Merlin: Oh, that's a really good point.
Merlin: What about a chimp or a monkey?
Merlin: Should you be cutting up monkeys?
Merlin: Cutting up monkeys right and left.
Merlin: That sounds like an indie rock term.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Cutting up monkeys.
Merlin: Cutting up monkeys.
Merlin: If I don't hear that used to describe the business process.
Merlin: We had a $500 guarantee in craft services, but by the end of the night, I was cutting up monkeys.
John: Well, I think it's going to be much more a thing where a guy in a boardroom who's not wearing a tie, because real rich people don't have to wear ties.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Well, I'm going to start capturing, and I will be typing here.
Merlin: I'm going to start capturing a few of these that we might be able to introduce as a service to our listeners.
Merlin: These are some potentially context-free jargon phrases.
Merlin: It's a little bit of a Letterman bit here.
Merlin: But if they come up, I would like to have some...
Merlin: Some new phrases that we could encourage people for the year 2017 to start introducing in their life.
Merlin: And you can decide what it means.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think that cutting a hole in a dog is real good.
John: Cutting up monkeys.
John: Okay.
John: Also good.
John: And I think those represent very different business processes.
John: You got to cut a hole in a dog.
Merlin: I like that these are really grounded in physical.
Merlin: How about maybe like put your hat in the freezer?
Merlin: Well, oh, so here's the thing.
John: This is actually a good analogy.
John: Oh, good.
John: I was reading the other day that if you have moths in your cashmere, and moths in your cashmere, that's another one.
John: Got it.
John: Got it.
John: If you have moths in your cashmere, don't be alarmed now.
John: It's just a spring queen for the make queen.
Merlin: Spring queen for the make queen.
John: But one thing you could do.
Merlin: What the fuck does that mean?
What?
Merlin: One thing you can do is put your cashmere in the freezer.
Merlin: Oh, I know.
Merlin: I know it's serious.
Merlin: Okay.
John: That's good.
John: So I don't want to use cashmere in all of these things, right?
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Is it possible, John, that everything we have to learn can be found in the lyrics of Led Zeppelin?
John: I believe it.
John: I believe I have already lived this philosophy.
Merlin: Proud, Ariane.
John: One word, my will to sustain.
John: It's all.
John: It's all.
John: Can I?
John: Where's the confounded bridge?
John: It's all in Led Zeppelin.
Merlin: They were so far ahead of us.
John: So put your wool in the freezer.
John: Put your wool in the freezer.
John: That's not just a prophylactic, but it's also an emergency response.
Merlin: These seem timeless.
Merlin: Some of these feel like they could be from a Silicon Valley boardroom, or they might be from Will Rogers.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Will Rogers would say, put your wool in the freezer.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Or let me catch you, put your wool in the freezer.
Merlin: How about, sometimes even a dirt farmer needs to fill the tractor.
John: Is that too long?
John: Even a dirt farmer needs to, yeah, we got to shorten that down.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: What could it be?
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: How about this?
Merlin: Don't break your glasses because you don't like the movie.
John: Don't break your glasses because you don't like the movie.
John: Yeah.
John: I think we had, let's jazz it up.
John: Don't sit on your glasses because you don't like the movie.
John: What about that?
John: Don't sell your glasses?
John: Oh, don't sell your glasses because you don't like the movie.
John: See, that's stretching a little bit.
Merlin: We need something that's got to be a lot pithier.
Merlin: That's no boil the ocean.
John: Yeah, no, boil the ocean.
John: That should be our stand.
Merlin: We can make them a little more mysterious.
Merlin: We could just say things like, you've got to jiggle the handle.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Jiggle the handle.
Merlin: There you go.
Merlin: Put that down.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I mean, the thing is, this is just blue sky solutioneering.
Merlin: At this point, we're just putting ideas on the board.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Don't take your windshield wipers off despite the rain.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And don't spit into the wind.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger.
John: Right.
John: And don't mess around with Jim.
Merlin: Don't mess around with Jim.
Merlin: That's number three.
John: You know what?
John: Don't mess around with Jim is a pretty good... I can't remember... I wasn't trafficking in adult...
John: Life in the 70s amongst adults who would say things like don't mess around with Jim You know like the adults that were standing around me whose language I was trying to pick up on They weren't wearing blue jeans.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I barely knew anyone that any adult person who had ever worn blue jeans
John: Did they call them dungarees?
John: Yeah, I believe.
John: My dad certainly wasn't going to wear a pair of dungarees.
Merlin: I've known a lot of adults like this.
Merlin: I'm thinking of the father of a lady friend of mine.
Merlin: whose father wore a suit for everything.
Merlin: And when it was time for him to dress up for Halloween, he wore a suit, but he added a towel and said that he was a sheik.
Merlin: Because he couldn't suffer the idea of appearing anywhere not in, at that time, a three-piece suit.
John: Right.
John: Well, I think I've told you the story, almost certainly I have, that at Christmastime in 1984, or something...
John: I had I'd been introduced to Levi's.
John: My mom was telling this story the other day where she said, you know, in 1983 or something, I took Susan, my sister.
John: This is my mom talking.
John: She took her to the thrift store because my sister was a punk rocker.
John: And my mom said, you know, go crazy.
John: You can buy as much stuff in this thrift store as you want.
John: And so Susan bought 15 bags of, like, bebop dresses.
Merlin: The dollar went a long way at a thrift store at that time.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: And there was so much genius stuff.
Merlin: I mean, unless you were getting a suit, you might spend $3 to $6 on a suit.
Merlin: But really, $2 was the most you would spend on a shirt, for example.
John: $3 pair of pants.
John: And hipsters weren't really there yet en masse.
John: And so thrift stores were full of 50s, Levi's, all this 60s.
Merlin: A lot of people with good taste, let's be honest, had recently died.
Merlin: You're getting quality stuff from people with good taste.
John: Well, and also up to a certain point, there was no what we would call now bad stuff, you know, like all that stuff was handmade somewhere in New York City by in like a in the garment district.
John: Even the cheap clothes were.
Merlin: Well, I used to, I think I've told you this, but I used to have like a focus where I was developing like collections.
Merlin: And there was, gosh, I'm not going to remember it now, but for years, J.C.
Merlin: Penney had a line of like basically, not Phil, someone I'm thinking of, a little bit like Pendleton.
Merlin: They had like these really nice like plaid work shirts that they made for years.
Merlin: The name's escaping me.
Merlin: But for years and years, if you, I would just look through the labels and look for those and find those because they were
Merlin: Always really great.
Merlin: I call them Paul Westerberg shirts because you like Paul Westerberg when you're wearing one of these.
Merlin: But that was a terrific shirt.
Merlin: And this is in the days before the grunge.
Merlin: You got to understand this before the grunge cleaned everything out.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Before the grunge.
Merlin: So she goes and she buys she buys bags of dresses.
John: Well, and so she was mocking me in this conversation.
John: Then this conversation happened a week ago, by the way.
John: And she said, yeah, and at that point in time, John was all, you know, he was in his preppy phase.
John: And so he had to go to Nordstrom.
John: And for the cost of three garbage bags full of 60s clothes that Susan bought, John only got one shirt.
John: And I said, let me set the record straight here.
John: First of all.
John: I never owned a shirt with a logo on it because my mom, even at the time, would have mocked me mercilessly for having... You had to make your own Smiling Alligator shirt.
John: Yeah, I made Smiling Alligators instead.
John: And second of all, the only time my mom ever took me to Nordstrom was during their half-yearly men's sale that happened...
John: Like basically right about now, right after Christmas.
John: And I was, you know, I was allowed to shop in certain sections and I was constantly going to school.
John: Everybody else had Nikes with a red stripe and I was wearing Stadia's or some shoe that had a, do you remember?
John: They had a whale on them.
John: I do.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: And I had, I don't know if it was Montgomery Wards or Pennies, but one, I mean, the thing is, this is the time when you had to have, you were a Nike person, or you were an Adidas person, or you were a weirdo.
Merlin: And most of the cool kids were Nike people.
Merlin: Yeah, but you sure as shit didn't have a whale or a fox on your shirt.
Merlin: I had a pair from Monkey Wards that had four stripes instead of three on it.
Merlin: Oh, that's the worst!
Merlin: Or like the upside-down almost swoosh.
Merlin: Around 1981, one of the department store brands started putting it.
Merlin: It was like a swoosh, but it was upside-down and not quite a swoosh.
Merlin: Like a scythe.
Merlin: I mean, you're better off wearing napkins on your feet.
Merlin: You look like such a chode.
John: And so this is the fashion, the...
John: The wasteful fashion maven that I supposedly was when I was in ninth grade, just desperately trying not to get thrown into a pot of boiling oil.
John: And I was nowhere even in the running.
John: I just didn't want to wear...
John: Things like you're saying that were that were visibly knockoffs of a thing right now And so it looks like here's the thing it looks like you think you're pulling it off And there's nothing that makes you look weaker than not pulling off something and acting like you're pulling it off Yeah, well either that you're pulling it off or that you are so blind To what constitutes good that you think there's no difference Which is even a worse
John: uh like thing to put on you right that you're just like oh these are these have a red stripe and you don't even have the like the the visual information processing power to know that the stripe is upside down and there's a time in your life that where you can't imagine like you know if somebody did buy you a pair of 15 shoes they had the wrong stripes on it you'd be like what is wrong with you you'd be and that's how i feel today like i still don't know who nelly is
John: Oh, no, me either.
Merlin: You know the feeling, though?
Merlin: I don't know where it happened, but I passed through some kind of long hallway at some point, and I just don't know what the fuck's going on anymore.
John: Well, it was also at a time, of course, when you couldn't, if somebody bought you a $15 pair of shoes, you couldn't not wear them.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
John: Right?
John: It's not like you're going to put them in the closet and never touch them because they're humiliated.
Merlin: When you go and get a job, you can go buy your $40 Nikes.
John: Anyway, so immediately six months after this titular moment when my mom is describing me as the biggest, most wasteful land pig she'd ever seen, I had figured out, oh, you can buy preppy clothes at the thrift stores, too.
John: And then, you know, but apparently I still, in my mom's version of the world, I'm still like this guy throwing money at Izod shirts.
John: I don't even know.
John: She doesn't have the visual cutie.
John: Maybe she thought my smiling alligator really was a... Anyway.
John: That was worse than a snob on a budget.
John: I don't think so.
John: All this is to describe that moment when I had gotten hip to Levi's, finally.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I bought my... What are we talking here, 80s, 90s?
John: Yeah, or no, no, no, no.
John: Mid-80s.
Merlin: I resisted them for a while and continued to wear... This is when they were still... I mean, Levi's are costly now.
Merlin: But you could go get you some $20 Levi's back then.
John: Well, but also there were so many rules about wearing Levi's because they were the only jeans other than Wrangler's, which nobody was going to wear.
Merlin: They survived the great jean wars.
Merlin: I mean, there were always going to be Wrangler and Lee people.
Merlin: But Levi's really emerged as the go-to.
Merlin: They started as the go-to denim brand and ended as the go-to denim brand.
Merlin: And partly, I don't want to get into too much of a turns out here.
Merlin: I'm not going to go off economics on this.
Merlin: Go ahead.
Merlin: Well, I think in the same way that there was backlash against disco because of homophobia and racism, I think in some ways there was giant backlash against designer jeans because A, they seemed snooty.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And B, they seemed kind of disco.
Merlin: The idea of spending $40 or $80 on a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.
John: Right.
John: Or Jordache.
John: Jordache.
John: Or guest jeans.
John: Calvin Klein.
John: And the thing is, a lot of people are listening.
John: They're not understanding because now, of course, there are a thousand kinds of very expensive jeans that
Merlin: Now I get Levi's and they're $50, and that's like some of the less expensive brand jeans.
John: Oh, dude, you can spend $250 on a pair of jeans.
John: I could throw a baseball from where I'm sitting and hit a pair of $250 jeans for sale.
John: You got a good arm.
John: Well, you know, I'm also sitting pretty darn close to an expensive jeans place.
Merlin: Our friend Matt Alexander sent me some nudie jeans, and then I found out what they cost, and I was a little bit beside myself.
John: We've talked about this before, the arrival on the scene of the seven for all mankind genes that suddenly made everybody's butt look good.
John: And prior to that, I really do think in these terms that prior to that moment, the seven to all mankind, like technology, butt technology, butt shaping technology of these genes, I still don't understand how it works.
John: But there was a time before this when you looked across a cityscape
John: Looking at butts, as I so often did, you saw a whole range of butts, a monopoly of butts.
John: And some were good, and some were bad, and some looked square, and some looked like pears.
Merlin: Some butts were ambivalent.
Merlin: Some butts were ambitious.
Merlin: It was a great American melting pot.
John: It was a color wheel of butts.
John: And then this gene technology came out, and I still am amazed by it.
John: I do not know what exactly happened, where it was some kind of placement of the pockets and some sort of addition of a couple of percentage points of spandex into the Levi's or something.
John: I don't know what happened.
John: But all of a sudden, all butts looked the same.
John: And it was a good same.
John: Like, they had achieved this not just
John: Making butts look good, but then I made it accessible to everything like a butt singularity.
John: Well a little bit like you look around and you're like, yeah, that's Maybe put differently.
John: Nobody's butt looks heinous.
John: Nobody's butt looks things and everyone Everyone wants their butt to look good Even if they don't say it they're thinking it
John: I think everybody, yeah.
John: And a lot of people aren't brave enough to say it.
John: I remember walking with a girl, a girl I was dating at the time.
John: This is many, many years ago, early, early 90s.
John: And I was in a group of friends, like seven guys that were all my friends.
John: One of them was somebody's little brother.
John: But, you know, it was like a bunch of guys that I considered one of my groups of friends.
John: And we're walking along.
John: She was a very fashionable girl.
John: And she and I are bringing up the rear, if you will.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And she says, just kind of, you know, casually out of the side of her mouth, she's like, eight guys and not a single good ass.
John: Wow.
John: And I looked ahead and all of a sudden all these friends of mine, like they just, they went from color to black and white.
John: I was like, oh my God, she's right.
John: There's not a single good butt in the group and I wouldn't have noticed.
John: um because each butt was different and i was appreciating like the whole you know this guy likes this guy has already adopted that weird super big big pants thing that was maybe you've seen a little bit more forest than tree yeah this guy over here's got a chew can ring in his pants like they haven't really figured it all out and she just said like eight guys and not a good butt in the bunch and then of course the second thought i had was like what about my butt
John: That's right.
John: Can I be so lucky as to be the best bud in this group?
John: That seems a little bit risky to think.
Merlin: It's amazing how you can go from not knowing about something to have it being the most important thing in your life in like half a second.
John: Well, and she's going out with me, right?
John: So she obviously it matters enough that she wouldn't have chosen me of my book.
John: So from that moment, from 1991 to the present, I have always carried around with me a sense confirmed by many like fishing expeditions.
John: Fishing expeditions, by which I mean, do these pants look good on me?
John: Yeah, they look good.
John: I mean, do they look, like, great on me?
John: Oh, yeah, they look fine.
John: I mean, here, check it from this angle.
John: Is this a good pair of pants?
John: Yeah, yeah, they're fine.
John: And it's like I'm including that data in my general survey.
Merlin: But you're calculating a notion that you might have a good butt?
John: Oh, I'm calculating a notion that I have a fine butt, an okay one.
John: Oh, like acceptable.
John: Yeah, one that passes muster enough that no one's going to walk behind me and say like, or worse, nobody's going to walk behind me and just not notice my butt at all.
Merlin: But you're not a grotesquerie, but you're not going to win any contests.
John: Well, because I've floated this balloon enough times and have really never once gotten a single like...
John: Oh, yeah, those pants look good.
John: Not maybe in that tenor, maybe an octave up, but still, I've taken enough surveys to know that if people are physically coveting me, it isn't for that reason.
John: Okay.
John: But I have never adopted modern gene technology either.
John: I continue to wear dumpy Levi's, which do not actually fit my frame, right?
John: Because Levi's aren't pants.
John: Levi's are a process.
John: We've talked about this.
John: And at the time, in the early 80s, right, people were ironing their Levi's, reaching them to perfection.
John: Oh, so back to my original point.
John: I bought my dad a pair of Levi's.
John: I'm sure I've told you this.
John: I bought my dad a pair of Levi's for Christmas.
John: Like, here you go, Dad.
John: Like, get with the times a little bit.
John: Yeah, join the Pepsi generation.
John: Yeah, I'm 14 years old or something, as though my dad's never seen a pair of jeans.
John: And I'm like, hey, old man.
John: What are these for?
John: You know, you don't have one of these.
John: What are you going to do about this?
John: A lot of kids are listening to heavy metal.
John: I'm going to turn you on to a new thing, too.
John: Levi's pants.
John: And my dad opens the package.
John: And it was like the one time many, many moons ago where I bought a girlfriend of mine a gold chain.
John: I was in New York City and I bought this very delicate little gold chain at one of those stores on 42nd Street where it's just a guy sitting in there with a loop on his glasses.
John: Yeah, sure, sure.
John: And he's smoking a cigar.
John: And you're like, I want to buy a gold chain.
John: And he's like, all right.
John: And I bought this gold chain and I gave it to her on her birthday or something.
John: And she opened the package and looked at me, looked immediately up at me and said, do you not know me at all?
John: No.
No.
John: I spent a lot of money on that.
John: Oh, no.
John: Anyway, so my dad opens this box, and there's a pair of Levi's in there.
John: And I'm like, those are called Levi's, Dad.
John: They're like a thing that everybody's wearing now.
John: Get with the times.
John: You know, they're very versatile.
John: And my dad said, looked up in the same way as my old girlfriend, and said, I'm not an enlisted man.
John: I don't dress like an enlisted man.
Merlin: Whoa.
Merlin: I'm adding that one to the list.
John: Don't dress like an enlisted man.
John: I'm not an enlisted man.
John: Right?
John: He said, I'm an officer.
John: I wear khaki.
John: I work for a living.
John: And it was something from the United States Navy in 1940.
John: Oh, it's a whole different signification for him.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: That's a swabby.
Merlin: You're going to be a guy with a mop on deck.
John: Yeah, you're an NCO.
John: And if you're, you know, your casual work clothes, if you're an NCO, were dungarees.
John: These are pants for semen.
John: And your formal outfits, too, are blue pants, blue wool pants.
John: And the officers were always in khaki pants, either casual or when they're in their dress uniforms.
John: And it was something that had been baked into him at a very, very young age.
John: And I think that back in the 1930s, that had already been true in the Navy for so long that it was understood...
John: The introduction, I think, of khaki pants into the culture only came through the Navy.
John: Wow, turns out.
John: That's a good one.
John: And the introduction of blue jeans really, you know, they came off of the farm, but...
Merlin: It came out of, I mean, the story goes in this neck of the woods that Levi Strauss, basically, there was a demand amongst gold miners and the people who were making monies off gold miners for something more sturdy.
Merlin: And that he started making them out of the canvas of tents is the way the story goes.
Merlin: So that's where the original, I think, blue jeans come from.
John: Okay.
John: Of course, so Levi's are from San Francisco, so everyone in San Francisco knows the whole story.
Merlin: Well, I think technically, I mean, obviously that's where they're based, but I mean, gold country is where people were buying them out east of here.
Merlin: But the thing is, here's the thing.
Merlin: I know that I'm older than a lot of our listeners, but I wasn't allowed to wear jeans to schools.
John: Oh, that's right.
Merlin: I forgot about that.
Merlin: To me, jeans or dungarees, as my grandmother called them, that was something you would wear to plant tomatoes.
Merlin: That is not something you wear anywhere but at the house or maybe to a picnic.
Merlin: You know how in England all the boys wear shorts and short pants are how you know somebody's still a kid?
John: There it is.
John: Put that on the list.
John: What's that?
John: Short pants is how you know someone's still a kid.
What?
John: I'm not an enlisted man.
John: I'm not an enlisted man.
John: Yeah, my mom used to talk about in the 1950s that all the fashionable girls, you would never, of course, wear this to school.
John: But on the weekends, you would wear your brother's jeans and your brother's white dress shirt.
John: Oh, that is cute.
John: Isn't that a nice look?
Merlin: That is so cute.
John: But that required that your brother's jeans and brother's white dress shirt only be slightly bigger than you.
John: It was when people were much more the same size as one of them.
Merlin: I learned this at Goodwill in the 80s is the old people were small.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And they were small.
John: They were like equi-small.
Merlin: People didn't really get big until at least the 70s.
John: If you look at pictures of people in the film.
John: Which, of course, we all do.
John: Yes.
John: The standard seems to be that the man be, what, three inches taller than the woman?
John: Yeah.
John: And maybe, like, just slightly, I don't know, like, not even any more broad.
Merlin: I think Bogey had to stand on an Apple box.
Merlin: Put that on the list.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Bogey on an apple box?
Merlin: Bogey had to stand on an apple box?
Merlin: Are you kidding me?
Merlin: How about put your bogey on an apple box?
John: That's who moved my cheese as anything.
John: But, you know, like for me to be standing next to my leading lady where I'm three inches taller than her, she would have to be a very large woman.
John: And if you think about Archie Comics, right, Moose and Midge, that was played for laughs.
John: Moose is big, Midge is small, lol.
John: Contrast.
John: But Moose was probably 5'9".
John: Isn't that amazing?
Merlin: It's like a Peter Jackson thing.
John: Yeah, it's like a Peter Jackson thing.
Merlin: It's a forced perspective.
Merlin: Everything's the same size.
Merlin: Everything used to be smaller.
Merlin: They talk about this now.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be anything-ist, but they talk today about how for Americans, you've got to make seats bigger.
Merlin: When you try to put people of our time onto a ferry, for example, some kind of conveyance that was built in another generation, they don't fit.
John: You got to retrofit the ferry.
John: Okay.
John: I'm writing that one down.
John: Put that down.
John: Retrofit the ferry.
John: Okay.
John: You know, a lot of my people in the show business, this was an interesting thing I learned many years ago from a booking agent, someone that we would call a buyer, which is to say someone that's booking a club, not a seller, which is a booking agent that represents a band.
Merlin: Okay, now I'm learning some jargon.
John: This is good.
John: So, yeah, a booking agent at a club is buying the artist.
John: And the booking agent that works for him, of course, is selling.
John: So a buyer once told me, because many years ago, probably 2003, I started to be able to estimate the capacity of a club pretty easily from the back of the room.
John: And it's a skill that you have to learn when you're in the business because you walk into a room and you're like, oh, this place is a capacity 320.
John: And then the booking agent walks up and he's like, yeah, capacity 275.
Merlin: So you're doing a little bit of arithmetic based on things like guarantees and things like that, right?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Or estimated what you can expect to make that night.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: What constitutes a sellout here is the thing that everybody really cares about.
John: And if he's saying it's a sellout,
John: and he says the capacity is 275, then that's how he's going to settle with you.
John: If you put 320 people in that room, that's something you should know.
Merlin: I got it.
Merlin: Are you picking me up?
Merlin: Are you reading me loud and clear?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, you're five by five.
Merlin: You sound great.
John: Good, good, good.
Merlin: I heard somebody coughing.
Merlin: Is that what 5x5 means?
Merlin: Yeah, I heard somebody coughing, and I heard, or I'm guessing it's probably a LaCroix opening at one point.
John: Yeah, there's a lot.
Merlin: But no, you sound great.
Merlin: You sound like you're in a cathedral.
Merlin: 5x5 is an indication of the strength and volume of your signal.
John: Wow.
Merlin: God, I learned something.
Merlin: Isn't that good?
Merlin: That's pretty good jargon, huh?
John: Well, so the buyer was saying, the capacity of this room at a Of Montreal show...
John: Or the capacity of this room at a Boards of Canada show is about 200 more people than the capacity of this room at a Melvin show or a Mastodon show.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: Interesting.
John: Yeah.
John: He said, at an indie rock concert, I can put...
John: So many more people in this room because the people are themselves smaller.
John: Whoa.
John: And at like a heavy metal show, an old school rockabilly punk rock show, the fans themselves are so like demonstrably larger people that it cuts the capacity of this room by a couple hundred.
John: And he's talking about a big room.
Mm-hmm.
John: Um, and I was just like, that cannot possibly be true.
John: And he said, you know, come to two shows and tell me, I mean, tell me your experience.
John: And of course I'd been to all those shows and you know, it's absolutely true.
John: There are rock shows that I can go to where I have a perfect line of sight of the stage, no matter where I'm standing in the room, because the average size is five, eight of the people at the show.
Um,
Merlin: I bet Montreal attracts a pretty slight of build.
John: Right, right?
John: Whereas if I go to a Mastodon show, I feel like I am in a forest of meat.
John: Like I can't I can't necessarily see the stage because there are there are like ants in leather jackets standing all around me.
John: And and that's that's astonishing.
John: And that's the type of thing that is, you know.
John: And across other, like using that as a metaphor, it's very hard nowadays to not get into tricky territory when you start talking about audiences for things or groups.
Merlin: Yeah, I think it's better to probably, yeah.
John: But it's, you know, people in the world of show business are saying, you know, this guy is saying, I can't put max capacity in this room.
John: I'm losing money.
John: Because there just isn't room for the people.
Merlin: That's a strange constraint.
Merlin: You okay?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I'm great.
John: I was just opening a LaCroix, and I wasn't really.
John: But I have a mute button here.
John: Oh, that's terrific.
John: Oh, huh.
John: I have a mute button now, and I'm learning to use it.
John: Because, you know, I've heard over the years that it's something that you should learn to use.
John: And, I mean, I'm still going to clear my throat on the program.
Merlin: You know, everything that's in the show is part of the show.
Merlin: I mute if I urinate.
Merlin: And I mute if I make coffee.
Merlin: And I mute if I open a new drink.
Merlin: I'm still just at the tail end of my coffee.
Merlin: And I got the same seltzer right here.
Merlin: I appreciate your professionalism, though, and this is your craft, John.
Merlin: You're somebody who's not afraid to cut up some monkeys.
Merlin: You know that this is your craft, and you're always working to improve it.
John: Well, let me explain.
John: I'm recording from California, as I say, and so my situation has changed quite a bit.
John: I'm using a computer that doesn't belong to me right now because although I have my...
John: mobile podcast rig that I carry with me everywhere, I invariably forget one key component of it every time.
John: One time I forgot the cord that hooks my mic to the computer.
John: One time I forgot my headphones.
John: And now twice I've forgotten the power cable for the computer.
Merlin: Oh, and these don't work betwixt the very... I see what you're saying.
Merlin: Oh, you're in dongle hell.
John: Right, so here I'm recording on a MacBook Air.
John: Normally I have a MacBook Pro, is that what it is?
John: And the two power cables, never the twain shall meet because they're separated by two years or something.
John: And so it's separated by six months in the Apple churn.
John: And so anyway, so my experience here is different in two crucial ways.
John: One, there is almond milk in my coffee instead of cream.
John: I don't think that's really milk.
John: It's not at all.
John: You can't milk an almond.
John: Yeah, right.
John: There are certain kinds of vegetarians, I think, now where every single thing they eat is made of almonds in the same way that it used to be made of soybeans.
John: You get tofu, right?
Merlin: Back in the day.
John: But now you can get an almond loaf, baked in almond milk, covered with almond cheese, you know, with some almond chicken wings.
John: I mean, it's insane when you go to the store.
John: If you could turn your Google Glass so it only allowed you to see things made of almonds.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
John: You know, Google Glass R.I.P.,
John: But the other difference is that this computer is set so that it goes to sleep
John: Pretty fast.
John: That's because the Millenniums like to save energy.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: It's gone to sleep now twice on me during this program.
John: And then it just has a screen saver of basically the Apple logo and then the name of the owner of the computer and the words MacBook Air just sort of bouncing around a black screen.
Merlin: Okay, now you're fuzzing out a little bit just now.
Merlin: Did you do anything?
Merlin: Are you downloading anything?
No.
John: No, no.
John: In fact, I can't download anything because the computer has gone to sleep.
John: And I can't wake it up without a password.
John: Oh, dear.
John: Yes.
John: See what I'm saying?
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: We're probably on borrowed time.
John: No, I don't think so, because I've done the classic thing of talking about it on the internet program enough that my lady friend, my millennial girlfriend, heard what I was saying and came over in a fairly perfunctory way.
John: and inputted her password into the computer so now i'm back up back online wow and uh crisis narrowly averted and now i'm going to sit here absent-mindedly running my finger over the mouse pad the mousing surface there yeah so the mousing surface um
John: Run your finger on the mousing surface?
Merlin: That's kind of there.
Merlin: Retrofit the fairy.
Merlin: I think we probably just need to sit with this for a while.
Merlin: We'll get some good ones.
Merlin: I like the ones that really don't mean anything.
Merlin: I guess we've got a few of those, but I also would like to explore more of the ones that literally don't mean anything.
Merlin: To me, that's the ones where I could really see some traction coming along.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: See, now I don't want to try too hard.
Merlin: This is what happens.
Merlin: When you're doing blue sky solution hearing, you just got to unclench.
Merlin: Wait, you just got to unclench.
Merlin: I'm going to add that.
Merlin: Pretty good.
John: You've got to, if you're doing blue sky solution hearing, you have to unfudge.
John: Oh, sorry.
Merlin: Unclench, John.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: Oh, unclench.
Merlin: You're very near the ocean.
Merlin: You're probably getting some interference.
Merlin: Well, listen, I promise you as your friend that if something happens and it does drop out, I will hit the bell and we can end the show like gentlemen.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi.
Merlin: I'm Merlin.
Merlin: I wonder how I should handle that.
Merlin: There's a lot of gold in there.
Merlin: I don't want to leave any of that out.
John: No, no, it's all good.
John: In a form of sympathetic magic, many people in cargo cults built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more airplanes.
Merlin: So is this something I mostly got it right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Attract more airplanes.
Merlin: Coconut headphones.
John: Yeah, coconut headphones.
John: That's a good indie rock band name, coconut headphones.
Merlin: I'm happy to say, at my advancing age, I think I've given my family a gift in some ways, a meta gift, which is that I have now settled into being very happy with getting mostly the same things for Christmas every year.
Merlin: Because I actually really do want and need them.
Merlin: What are those?
Merlin: Well, I mean, one of the top items is I get a new pair of 501s.
Merlin: Field notes?
Merlin: No, no, but I get a new pair of 501s.
Merlin: Every year?
Merlin: Every 1225, I get me a new pair of 3430, 3430, 3432.
Merlin: I get a new pair of 501s, and then the cycle continues.
John: You get a new pair of 3230s, 3430s?
Merlin: I think it's 3430, 3432, something like that.
Merlin: Yeah, I get that.
Merlin: I get some socks.
Merlin: I usually get like a sweater.
Merlin: Santa really got me some of these long sleeve t-shirts that I like a lot.
Merlin: And I'm happy as a pig in clams when that happens.
John: So every year you get one pair.
Merlin: 5440s it's probably more 501 the classics unwashed that we've talked about i don't really even need them because i wear them for longer than a year but my daughter is nine and she is becoming more confident aggressive about telling me what i should do differently and what it is i need to stop wearing pants with holes and then when i pick her up at school i embarrass her trashed pants she's done with those
John: So do you have a silo filled with Levi's that you consider still very wearable and usable, but that you have semi-retired because your daughter no longer feels like they're acceptable streetwear?
John: That's a great question.
Merlin: Basically, there's three levels.
Merlin: There's the current Levi's.
Merlin: Where you could actually wear them to dinner.
Merlin: And people wouldn't go like this.
Merlin: So there's those.
Merlin: And then you've got the ones that are faded.
Merlin: They might have some holes.
Merlin: You've got the iPhone hole on the left side.
Merlin: I always get an iPhone hole.
John: The space pen.
Merlin: space pen uh invagination and and the thing is then you got the third group which are the ones i'd like to hang on a little bit longer but i'm getting the stink eye and usually those get donated to my daughter to be cut up and used as fabric for her sewing projects oh i see um but so there aren't any levi's that are that are that are trashed but that you can't surrender
Merlin: Well, that was the case.
Merlin: There was a pair that fell into that third group in the last six months.
Merlin: I was really sorry to say goodbye to.
Merlin: But as we talked about many times before, everybody's Levi's blowout in a way that is peculiar to them.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: And always it's one knee before the other for me.
Merlin: It's one pocket before the other for me.
Merlin: And it's the right side of the crotch starts to blow out.
Merlin: And I don't want to put a patch in there because this is 1972.
Merlin: I'm not going to live like that.
John: Well, you know, my crotch blows out pretty darn early.
John: Yeah.
John: Just because, I mean, who knows why.
John: Yeah.
John: But I have probably in the silo, in group three of my Levi's, I probably, let's say, 18 pairs of group three Levi's.
John: What?
John: That I keep in a duffel bag.
Yeah.
John: Some of them, you know, a lot of them dating back to when Levi's were still made in America.
John: So American made Levi's where they are still wearable except for a crotch blowout and a knee blowout that are very patchable.
John: Some of them have been patched already.
John: Like a lot of them have the thing where the crotch blew out and they were patched and then the knee blew out.
John: And I didn't have the foresight when the sewing machine was out and the patches were going on to say, like, let's also patch that knee.
John: Okay.
John: Because it's very hard to get the sewing machine back out two weeks later to put patches on all the pants again.
John: True.
John: And so back in the old days, of course, I would have worn them with the knees blown out until they were just, like, shredded.
Merlin: I'm not sure when that stopped being permissible.
Merlin: To me, a blown-out knee is not a climate-ending event.
Merlin: To me, a blown-out knee is a blown-out knee.
Merlin: It's just a thing.
Merlin: Now, the blown-out crotch, that throws a signal.
Merlin: You don't want to do that.
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: I guess maybe it's just not okay to have holes in your knees anymore.
John: Yeah, I mean, I think we're grownups now.
John: Can't really walk around with the knees and your pants blown out.
John: But I just recently, so I've been carrying around these jeans in a duffel bag for a long time because, you know, there are a lot of things about them.
John: They fit me like a glove as much as Levi's can ever fit me like a glove.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: They have a well-worn patina that belongs to me.
John: It's nobody else's patina.
John: It's your patina.
John: It didn't come from a factory.
John: It's not something I found in a store.
John: It's a patina that I built with my own blood, sweat, and tears.
John: And most of all, oh, and also they're American made and you can't get those anymore unless you want to pay top dollar.
John: But most importantly, they are still perfectly serviceable pants.
John: And just recently, now that I'm spending all this time in California, it was like the sun came out on these jeans and
John: I realized that they were all perfectly prepped to be cutoffs.
John: And down here in California, when it's warm a lot, I was going to say all the time, but I'm looking out at gray skies and my feet are freezing because it's freaking cold here right now.
John: It's wintertime.
John: But there's all these cutoffs just waiting to... People are still wearing cutoffs?
John: Well, this is the thing.
John: In California, who can tell me what to do?
John: Yeah, that's true.
John: Especially Venice Beach.
John: Venice Beach?
John: I mean, I've got like a lifetime collection of Hawaiian shirts that are not... They're not Magnum PI Hawaiian shirts.
John: They're the kind of Hawaiian shirts where the bold side of the fabric is turned in and the outside, the faded sort of like...
John: uh the through side of the fabric is turned out i don't know what those are called exactly i know what you mean though where it looks uh yeah yeah it's faded yeah i know what you mean the rain spooners or whatever and they're all uh they're none of them button none of them unbutton all the way down they're kind of their anorak style or whatever they only button like four buttons down and they're pullovers i don't know why when i was a kid i i got one of those shirts and i really thought it was great and uh so my whole life i've only ever
John: I've only ever tolerated that kind of Hawaiian shirt.
John: Like the rayon ones that have hula girls on them and that type of thing.
John: I don't want anything to do with them.
John: I don't want to touch those with a 10-foot pole.
John: I want ones that have a flower motif and are turned inside out and have an anorak style.
John: Well, I don't know if those are cool or not.
John: That's the only kind I have.
John: And I wear them all the time down here because there are people walking down Venice Beach dressed like Jimi Hendrix on a human bike.
John: So I started turning these Levi's into cutoffs.
John: And I remember when cutoffs, cutoff jeans were like the coolest jeans.
John: And so I feel very cool in them.
John: You know, you cut them off a little bit high.
John: And not so high that your pockets are sticking out.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: But, you know, like mid-thigh.
Merlin: Do you give them a cuff or do you hem them?
John: Oh, no.
John: No, you let them string out.
John: Let them fray.
John: You let them fray.
John: And, oh, I'm so pleased because, you know, these pants still fit good.
John: I've already mended the crotch in most cases.
John: And now I'm just walking around like I look like I'm ready for a hacky sack game at any moment.
John: I'm also wearing checkerboard Vans because I, you know.
John: Wow, you've really, you've got a whole look together.
John: I'm like so together.
John: I look like, and this is the thing I can't decide.
John: Because when I walk into a lot of the like cool cafes here in Venice.
John: Yeah.
John: It's like a lot of times when you walk into places in Los Angeles where actors and script writers and things hang out.
Mm-hmm.
John: You walk in the door and at least in my case, a lot of people look up and look at me for like three beats.
Merlin: Oh, they got the heads up display.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Scanning, scanning, scanning.
John: That's right.
John: Like, is this somebody?
John: Who is this?
John: Is this somebody?
John: That L.A.
John: thing.
John: Nobody in Seattle ever looks up.
Merlin: Is that the guy who writes for the Oscars?
John: Yeah, right.
John: Does he ride for Parks and Community?
John: Sure, sure.
John: You know?
John: And so I don't mind that, right?
John: Because I'm used to kind of feeling like when I walk into a room, everybody should look up for a second.
John: Totally, yeah.
John: But increasingly, with this outfit, the cutoffs and the Vans and the Hawaiian shirt, I'm not sure whether I look like somebody who's really...
John: had a success in hollywood is really like he's written some killer scripts and now he gets to like lebowski it everywhere he goes yeah or whether i look like somebody who shouldn't be allowed in the cafe right like somebody who's like a person is going to walk over and say can i help you sir yeah but yeah you that kind of can i help you sir but you know you carry yourself with a lot of dignity yeah like a script writer well right yeah
Merlin: Like somebody who won a couple Emmy Awards.
Merlin: Or like who's at least been optioned a few times.
Merlin: You've been optioned.
Merlin: Oh, for sure.
Merlin: For sure I've been optioned.
John: I'm so terrified of that world down here.
John: You see so many people just helplessly wanting.
John: They just want so much to be cast in something, to get that opportunity, to get their script looked at.
John: And they're, you know, they're like churning all the time, going to all this stuff, like really, really, really climbing.
Merlin: And it's like the clock's ticking the whole time.
John: The clock is ticking, you know.
Merlin: I mean, at least on their, I mean, in a long term sense, on their age, you know, and what they'll be suitable for, because the options go down as you get older.
Merlin: But also probably there's not like an unlimited amount of money to keep that thing afloat.
John: Well, that and also I think, and I'm not sure because I'm not embedded in the culture, but there's another clock that's ticking, which is how long have you been in Hollywood and nothing's happened for you?
John: Oh, maybe that's a sign that nothing's going to happen for you.
Merlin: It's like applying for too many credit cards.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Your stock goes down by the number of scripts that you've written that haven't gotten made.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: So it all just feels... And also, I mean, I had a friend that worked down here that was an actor, and eventually he decided that he didn't want to be an actor.
John: He wanted to be a professional waiter because it was at least something he was good at.
John: And he got tired of...
John: of applying for a job as a waiter in a restaurant where all the other waiters were were like really really beautiful actors and he realized like waiting you know in most places waiting isn't that hard why would you hire this 40 year old person when you could hire a 22 year old person that
Merlin: that looks like keanu reeves right um but that's the other problem down here there's always going to be somebody more beautiful than you if if your beauty and somebody just the obvious one somebody who wants it more or somebody who will sacrifice more forgo more right right so what do you end up doing did he go to uh poughkeepsie to to wait
John: No, he waited tables here in Hollywood for a long time because I think he got a good job in a fancy restaurant where it was important that he be a good waiter.
John: But also, he was a very handsome character actor.
John: You know what I mean?
John: He wasn't ever going to be a leading man, but he was definitely going to be... He was perfect to be the henchman of the villain.
Merlin: Oh, nice.
John: Like chief henchman.
John: Who was the long-haired blonde guy in Die Hard?
Merlin: The ballet guy, right?
Merlin: Yeah, the ballet guy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: Not Baryshnikov.
Merlin: He's the guy who died.
John: Yeah, he's the guy who died.
John: Die, hard.
John: Boy, this is killing me.
John: But you know, he was a great sidekick.
John: Alexander Gudinov.
John: Good enough, right?
John: He was you know, he was a good like chief bad guy chief henchman bad guy Mm-hmm because the because mr. Bad guy in die hard chief bad guy Gruber.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Yeah Hans Gruber He's not a guy that's ever really gonna pick up a gun my god that movie's so good unless he has to unless he's like trapped in a back hallway with You know with old what's-his-but then he's gonna pick up a gun
John: But for the most time, holding a gun isn't going to be his thing.
Merlin: Oh, he was in Witness.
Merlin: I forgot that he was in Witness.
John: Right, of course.
John: He's very Amish looking, too.
Merlin: He's Amish in Witness.
Merlin: I forgot about that.
John: And the German accent helps with the Witness, too.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But so, you know, I would not mind having a bad guy for a waiter.
Right.
Merlin: No, right?
John: He's one of those people that when he puts on one of those dumb pork pie hats that all the ding-a-lings wear, it looks instantly natural.
John: He's very Tom Waits.
Merlin: You gotta have the head for that.
John: Yeah, and you put it on, and I feel like you gotta have a whole, you have to look like an old-fashioned person.
John: Like, your face has to look old-fashioned.
John: For me, I can only get away, I think, with Al Capone hats.
John: At some point, I decided that Oscar Wilde slash Al Capone, those two guys were going to be my hat mentors.
John: I'm not going to wear a Tom Waits hat.
John: It just looks stupid on me.
Merlin: I think you should go for a full-on Quentin Crisp.
Merlin: Oh, a Quentin Crisp hat.
Merlin: Get you like a big peaked purple hat with maybe like a feather on it.
Merlin: Like an Oscar Wilde hat.
John: Yeah, you have to know what role you're auditioning for.
John: Anyway, my friend eventually, you know what he did?
John: He moved to Seattle and he described him, moved back to Seattle and described himself as a climate change refugee.
John: Is that a thing?
John: Well, apparently, the really forward-thinking people down here are starting to see the writing on the wall.
John: They're starting to see the water's never going to return.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: And also, they trend toward conspiracy.
John: Let's be honest.
John: And I'm starting to look at people now and say...
John: Just based on looking at you walking down the street, which way do you trend on conspiracy?
John: Okay.
Merlin: Not whether, but which?
John: Yeah.
John: If there's a new conspiracy, do you adopt somewhat of a skeptical take on it?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But still very interested to see, you know, like, does this conspiracy involve the Rothschilds?
John: Does it involve a one-world government?
John: Or is it more about that jet fuel can't melt steel beams?
John: Yeah.
John: And obviously they all blend together at a certain point.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: But, you know, you can tell a lot about somebody by their conspiracy theory, because, you know, it's what attracts you, but also what keeps you engaged.
Merlin: There's something about this you couldn't unhook from.
Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Well, so last night I played for my millennial girlfriend a couple of Building 7 videos just to see what would happen.
John: Like, here's some Building 7 stuff.
John: How do you feel about this?
John: And she immediately found it very appealing.
John: Like, turned to me a couple of times and said, well, how do you answer that?
John: What do you say to that?
Merlin: Is this the one that went down when it seemed like it shouldn't have really gone down?
John: Yeah, like, you know, six, seven hours later, this building collapsed.
John: And from the footage, very much seems like it's collapsing exactly like a Las Vegas hotel.
John: Right.
John: Like, it collapsed very perfectly.
John: You couldn't have collapsed that building any better if you had the top shelf building
Merlin: I watched the 9-11 documentary last week, and, you know, it was, first of all, very upsetting.
Merlin: You don't really get over that day, but also, like, it is pretty bananas that those two big buildings...
Merlin: Went so directly down.
John: Just like right straight down.
Merlin: I mean, the thing is, if I drop something off the roof of our house, it would land further away than these buildings did.
John: Right.
John: If you were throwing melons off the top of a three-story building, they're going to land in kind of a splatter pattern.
John: You're not going to get those melons right in the same spot each time.
John: So you tickled her conspiracy bone a little.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And I don't think it was a world that she'd been exposed to before, necessarily, where it's like, wait a minute, there's incontrovertible evidence here.
Merlin: I feel like somebody who's never played Zelda or something, where I hear about this world, and then I don't realize how deep it is until you just go and do a Google search like a person.
Merlin: And it's like, oh, my God.
Merlin: There's a lot in the documentaries, John.
Merlin: There's a lot of documentaries.
Merlin: I watched a real legit documentary, a straight mainstream documentary.
John: Sure, but if you get into Alex Jones' territory, you're going to see some amazing things.
John: Got to get up there and do your own research.
John: One of the things that happened here on the Building 7 documentary was it did extend to a general 9-11 hot take.
John: And that hot take was, in all seriousness, that both airplanes...
John: were in fact holograms.
John: Holograms.
John: That's right.
John: That no airplane actually hit either tower because if you look at the footage, if you study it, if you slow the footage down.
John: I bet you got to really look at it.
John: You have to really look at it slowed all the way down.
John: Okay.
John: You realize that...
John: The way that the planes impacted the building was physically impossible.
John: And there are 25 scientists on tap here that will confirm that that's not what would have happened.
John: It's not clear what would have happened.
Merlin: Well, I mean, if they're scientists, obviously, I've got to believe it.
John: The thing is that 757 had never crashed into a World Trade Center before.
John: So we can't be sure what would have happened.
John: We've got two in 20 minutes.
John: But we could be sure that it wouldn't have happened that way.
John: And we had the conversation here in the house because one of the things that they said in the documentary was...
John: Only three buildings in history have ever collapsed due to fire.
John: I mean, talking about skyscrapers.
John: Only three skyscrapers have ever collapsed due to fire.
John: And all three of them were at the World Trade Center site that day, that fateful day.
John: Building one, building two, and building seven.
Merlin: And as far as, I probably won't get this exactly right, but the buildings that were...
Merlin: destroyed in total were almost solely World Trade Center-related buildings.
Merlin: It's like a one-to-one ratio.
John: Yeah, they were completely World Trade Center buildings.
John: And, of course, there were seven World Trade Center buildings.
John: There wasn't a Carl's Jr.
John: or something.
John: No.
John: There was no Carl's Jr.
John: The little church that was there got, you know, some buildings got damaged, but they were repaired.
John: And there was one tree that survived, I think, and was replanted at the current World Trade Center site, as far as I know.
John: But the way this was stated, and my millennial girlfriend repeated it to me, like only three buildings in the history of time were destroyed by fire.
John: How do you explain that?
John: as though that in itself was conclusive, no skyscrapers... Well, first of all, do we know that that's a true statement?
John: I believe, you know, as far as skyscrapers go, can you think of another one that was destroyed by fire?
Merlin: Well, this is part of the problem, though.
Merlin: It's like, I'm not a skyscraper expert, but if somebody presents that as a fact, I'm not even sure where to go exactly to check it.
John: As someone, speaking as someone who, A, is a skyscraper expert, and very definitely, if a skyscraper had ever been destroyed by fire, I absolutely would have seen it.
John: Now...
John: I have the infrastructure.
John: God, why are we talking about this?
John: I have to temper this by saying I did not know about cargo cults, which also seems like a thing that a week ago I would have said if there's such a thing as a cargo cult, I would know about it.
Merlin: It just means you have room to grow.
John: Right.
John: That's right.
John: But my my only take on that was phrase that sentence just slightly differently.
John: Only three skyscrapers in history have ever been destroyed by fire.
John: So we don't really have a wide set of information to determine how it is supposed to happen.
John: Right?
John: Like all three of them collapsed just perfectly straight down.
John: Maybe that's what happens when a skyscraper is destroyed by fire.
Merlin: Well, I mean, not to be a pill, but how many buildings of greater than 80 stories have had a plane fly into them?
John: Right.
John: How many buildings greater than 80 stories have ever been built?
John: Destroyed?
John: Right?
Merlin: Right.
John: Let alone destroyed.
John: Exactly.
John: I think the answer is zero.
John: I don't think any building over 80 stories has ever been destroyed.
John: You're going to get some mail, buddy.
John: You're going to get mail.
Merlin: I think everyone that's ever been constructed is still standing.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: Because how?
Merlin: Fuck, are you going to take one down?
Merlin: Maybe we should move.
Merlin: I'm not saying we don't have time today, but maybe we should pivot here from clever catchphrases and jargon into facts.
Merlin: We could produce some facts for people.
John: Interesting.
John: Interesting.
John: What kind of facts would you like to produce?
Merlin: Oh, I mean, it's either the kind of thing that's really obvious until you think about it and then it doesn't make sense or the kind of thing that would be difficult to prove or the kind of thing that seems really smart but is actually just really obvious.
Merlin: Well, over 90% of the people living in Canada will die in the next 100 years.
John: I believe it.
John: I mean, you just phrased that as a statistic.
John: But for me, it always turns the opposite direction, which is to say, if you were going to destroy those buildings with explosives,
John: Which is the contention, basically, of all these conspiracy theories.
John: They all, no matter how many videos you watch of the airplane slamming into the building where you're like, that couldn't have happened, that's a hologram.
John: It always arrives at the point where those buildings were destroyed.
John: And if they were destroyed by explosives...
John: Do have a sense of what it would take to destroy the World Trade Center with explosives and what it would take is dozens of people?
John: wiring the entire building with explosives going off at intervals Going off at precisely determined intervals, but we're talking about a building that had
John: People working in it every day.
John: Yeah.
John: And so how do you flood this building with demolition experts and flood the building with all the cabling, the wiring, the fuses, the bombs and put them in the precise location that they need to be, which currently is covered with wall board because it's a freaking office that's occupied with people typing.
Merlin: I have to guess this has all been covered.
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: Well, by the people.
Merlin: They probably say, oh, well, you know, the government showed up and put it in the elevator shafts.
John: Yeah, but that wouldn't have destroyed.
John: Anyway, it always seems to me.
Merlin: Have you actually thought about this?
John: Yes, I have.
John: Before you even get to the level of why would they do this, which is the level that's really fun, right?
John: Boiling the ocean, right?
John: Well, because of the Jews, usually.
John: If you really go all the way back.
John: It's Jews all the way down.
John: It's because of the Jews.
John: It always is.
John: You have to un-code it.
John: You have to unpack it.
John: But eventually it's the Jews.
John: Who are always up to mischief.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: Yes.
John: But that's why.
John: It's just at the level of how.
John: If you're going all the way to making a hologram of a jet crashing into a building in order to avoid actually just crashing a jet into the building because you have a plan.
Merlin: Is that a typical Jew trick?
Merlin: The airplane hologram?
John: Listen, have you ever read the protocols of the elders of Zion?
John: It's right there.
John: I mean, it's not, they didn't have skyscrapers at the time.
Merlin: And so if you shoot the hologram, the image that's being projected onto air, when you shoot that from different angles, it still looks like a plane exploding in a building?
John: Well, here's what requires.
Merlin: I mean, I know they're good at, they're good with money.
Merlin: Yeah, they are.
Merlin: They make clothes.
John: They're very, very good at exploiting the blacks for making rock music.
John: That's another thing they're good at.
John: But what was required in order to make the holographic jets is stealth aircraft technology because the holograms were being broadcast from other planes.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: When you put it that way, it doesn't seem crazy.
John: So they're cloaked aircraft.
John: They're sort of Wonder Woman jets.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Like an invisible jet.
John: Invisible jet.
John: That is projecting holographic jets who are slamming into the buildings in impossible ways.
John: The impossibility of it is detectable by the human eye.
John: in order to make it plausible that these World Trade Center buildings are being destroyed by explosives, which is something that ultimately is part of what the Jews are up to, some kind of mischief that they're up to.
Merlin: They love their mischief, don't they?
John: Yeah, they do.
John: And this is a thing that you want to put like 400 documentaries on the Internet about.
Merlin: And having successfully created holograms of jets to cover up the fact that they were blowing up these buildings, the Jews get what?
John: Oh, I'm sorry.
John: Hegemony over our thoughts.
Merlin: Right?
John: It's all a big Manchurian candidate thing.
John: It's all a big distraction.
John: Yeah, it's a big distraction.
John: It's gaslighting all the way down.
John: And what it ultimately means is that what they're creating in us is like a Truman Show level of belief that we are living in a world that we are actually not living in.
John: The world that we're actually living in, if you take the red pill, is this world where the Rothschilds are bleeding us dry.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Making people into crackers and whatnot.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Making them into crackers and throwing them down a well.
John: But that's the thing that you need to open your eyes about.
John: Okay, I will.
John: Right?
John: Yep.
John: So the ultimate point of all these videos, and that's why they faked Sandy Hook too.
Merlin: Did they do that too?
John: Yeah, they did.
John: They faked Sandy Hook, which is just another way of taking our guns.
John: Oh, I see.
John: If you want to take our guns, what are you going to do?
John: Because people were upset about Sandy Hook.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: So you're going to fake this thing where a disturbed teenager goes into an elementary school and kills a bunch of kindergartners.
John: That's how you're going to get our guns.
John: I see.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: And that's the most efficient way to get the guns.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And the reason you want to get the guns?
Merlin: Because?
John: The Jews.
John: You got to get all the way back.
John: I'm not going to, you know, there's a lot of steps in between.
Mm-hmm.
John: But when you finally get all the way back there, it's George Soros sitting on top of a pile of gild.
Merlin: Spinning his dreidel.
John: Making holograms.
John: He's trying to, you know, there is a world of reality that he understands that we don't because we're blind.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: We're blind.
Merlin: How many more?
Merlin: But the thing is, I'm woke.
John: Right?
John: Yes.
Merlin: Yes, absolutely.
John: And so, you know, so I'm not living in this state of affairs.
Merlin: There are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on.
Merlin: Right?
John: There's two kinds of people in this world.
John: Winners.
Merlin: Losers.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Calling it.
John: Oh, if you can end the show on a Lindsey Buckingham quote.
John: Woo!