Ep. 248: "Hubris of the Moment"
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: It's going good.
John: Thank you for letting me sleep in today.
John: Did you sleep in a little bit?
John: Yeah, you gave me a little buffer.
John: I was up until 4.30 in the morning again because I made the wrong choices.
John: I had a piece of cake for late night dinner snack.
John: And I'm realizing that a piece of cake at 11 is going to sleep at 5.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Why do you think that is?
Merlin: Does the sugar stimulate you?
John: Well, it's always a chocolate cake.
John: And I don't know.
John: When I don't have it, I go to sleep.
John: Like a normal person, and when I do have it, I feel like I just ate a huge slice of chocolate cake.
Merlin: No, that's no good.
Merlin: That's a 5 a.m.
Merlin: type situation.
John: Yeah, then I fly across the night on my wings of destiny.
John: but uh but i so at five o'clock in the morning i was like i have to get up in five hour and four hours to talk to merlin uh but but i wrote you a text middle of the night text hey can i sleep in you were like yes and now here i am not with four hours of sleep but with six hours of sleep and i feel like
John: There's a huge difference between those things.
John: So thank you.
Merlin: There's a tremendous difference.
Merlin: I told you before about my concept of like, I have trouble getting back to sleep sometimes.
Merlin: And I told you about my concept of bonus sleep, right?
Merlin: You get double bonus sleep, triple bonus sleep.
Merlin: If you're able to go back to sleep for a period of time after you wake up, that's a huge win.
Merlin: But I've also found it very difficult because then you also have to be that person who says...
Merlin: if I pull this off, I'm going to be sleeping into the daylight part of the day when other people are doing things.
Merlin: And I think that's very difficult, and I feel resistance, and it's hard to do.
John: Yeah.
John: Part of the advantage, or well, let's see, I don't know if I should say advantage, but part of the experience of living alone is that I can pull the curtains, and I hear people out hammering in the neighborhood doing day work, and
John: But I pull the curtains and, you know, for a long time, all the way to noon, you can say to yourself, well, carpenters get up early.
John: Sure, those guys are out there hammering, but they're the 7 a.m.
John: carpenters.
Merlin: Oh, obviously.
Merlin: I mean, that's their whole stock and trade is their early guys.
John: Right.
John: But if you're living with other people, like when my daughter stays here with me.
John: I have to get up at the fucking crack of dawn.
Merlin: If I could ask, if it's not too private, what's her usual go-to on her own wake-up time?
John: She has three homes.
John: My home, her mother's home, and my mother's home.
John: In the course of a regular week, she stays in all three places.
John: Her natural wake-up time has three different
John: She had three different times.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: She wakes up differently at my mom's house on the reg.
John: She's always up and happy and playing in her room before my mom even comes in to wake her up.
John: And at her mother's house, she wakes up always kind of like eyes squinting, mad, at the same time of day.
John: And at my house, she will sleep until 11 o'clock in the morning if you let her.
John: Jiminy Christmas, really?
John: Yeah.
John: And there's no accounting for it because we've looked at every variable.
John: It's like, well, does the sun come in and wake her up?
John: No, the sun.
John: I mean, the sun does come in some places, but not others.
John: But it's not like it can't.
John: You can't account for it because of that.
John: Is it because of traffic noise or is my house quieter?
John: Something you're missing, something not obvious.
John: But we've tried, we've thought of everything and it just doesn't seem, you know, it could just be that my mom wakes up at four o'clock in the morning and even though she's quiet as a church mouse,
John: The energy of awakeness and aliveness is in my mom's house earlier.
John: And the energy in my house is like, you know, it's like a sleepy bear cave.
John: And I don't know how much you can in this modern era.
John: lean on the idea that not only does the house have an energy, but the energy of the people in the house is affecting the energy of other people in the house to the degree that they will sleep three extra hours a night.
John: But yeah, she has a very different experience.
John: Sometimes she'll stay in a bedroom upstairs at my house and she wakes up at a different time than if she stays in the bedroom in the bottom of the house.
Merlin: As you know, John, I don't like to get into the topic of magic.
Merlin: Magic and time travel are two things I prefer to avoid on our show.
Merlin: Anything else?
Merlin: Yeah, don't talk about time travel.
Merlin: I'll talk about anything else on this show.
Merlin: But two things I try to avoid.
Merlin: Magic and time travel.
Merlin: This might be spooky action at a distance, but I didn't read the article, but I saw a headline not long ago about, I guess, some scholarship into that feeling when you know someone is looking at you.
Merlin: Do you ever get that feeling?
Merlin: You're like, you turn and like somebody on the subway is looking at you or something like that.
Merlin: You ever, you know what I'm talking about?
Merlin: You know that feeling, that weird feeling of like...
John: I use it all the time in a crowd of people.
John: I'll sit and look at somebody in a crowd of people and wait for them to feel it and look over at me.
John: I mean, it's a thing you... I mean, yeah, not strangers, right?
John: I'm not just like, hello, hello, girl in poodle skirt.
John: It's like, oh, I see a friend across the crowd, and rather than teach my way through and be like, hey!
John: Instead of hailing them, you wait for their amygdala to get the John signal.
John: That's right.
John: I shoot the mind bullets at them and they're mind blanks.
John: They're not like dead bullets.
John: Yeah, like a brain squib.
John: Yeah, they're like paintballs, mind paintballs.
John: And more often than not, and it's not that they're sitting and scanning the room.
John: It's more often than not they kind of look up and they're like, oh, hey.
John: So, yeah, magic.
Merlin: I just wonder if it's something like that is what I'm saying, because I've had the same experience where, like, it's difficult for me to know.
Merlin: You know, I've tried all the variables with sleep, and I've tried enough of them.
Merlin: It's sort of like somebody going and getting a test for cancer every day.
Merlin: Like, eventually, you're probably going to die from the test rather than the cancer.
Merlin: And I've tried so many things with sleep, and, like, my results have been so weird.
Merlin: Like, I assume that sleeping with earplugs, and, you know, the thing is I quantify this.
Merlin: I've got a tracking device that tells me how long and how well I slept every night.
Merlin: And I can look at that in the morning and go, hmm, that was very interesting.
Merlin: I had this much deep sleep.
Merlin: I had this much round sleep.
Merlin: I had this much light sleep.
Merlin: And, like, I can't tell fuck all about it.
Merlin: I mean, like, you know, I even have an app that says, like, you know, I got this app that tries to be helpful and says things like, you know, you get more workouts when you take more steps.
Merlin: Like, you spend more time awake when you get up early.
Merlin: And I'm like, thanks, buddy.
Merlin: Thanks, little guy.
John: It's trying.
John: Some of them are pretty great.
Merlin: You weigh more when the days get longer, which is not only categorically untrue, but some of it's so strange.
Merlin: I did some screenshots of these.
Merlin: One of them was something like you have more sunny days when you're in Washington, D.C.
Merlin: I was like, that's, you know, I bet there's something to that that's true, but kind of weird.
Merlin: So anyway, I don't want to talk about time travel.
Merlin: I don't want to talk about magic.
Merlin: Maybe I want to talk about spooky action at distance.
Merlin: But I wonder if there's some explanation for this.
Merlin: It could be the ether in the air.
Merlin: It could be ghosts.
Merlin: Maybe there's something.
Merlin: It could be you have an unknown monk hole and maybe someone's coming up and trying to fix shoes.
Merlin: Like, you don't know.
Merlin: What about wormholes?
Merlin: It could be wormholes.
Merlin: It could be the tubes that run the internet.
Merlin: How do you know you don't have a wormhole?
Merlin: You can't even get a decent home inspection these days.
Merlin: How are you going to find out if you've got a wormhole or not?
John: They're not going to tell you that.
John: You can't even tell if your electrical outlets are grounded, let alone whether or not you have a wormhole.
John: You'd have to get a house inspector.
John: You'd have to get a psychic house inspector.
Merlin: You'd have to get somebody who's open to moving beyond the quality of the laminate floor to get down to the plywood underneath.
Merlin: Somebody who's able to come in and give you a high-level vision of the unseen.
John: What do you feel about spooky action at a distance?
Merlin: Boy, boy, boy.
Merlin: There's all kinds of stuff where I would like to think that I'm like a full-on, full-bore, pedal-the-metal, James Randi motherfucker, and that I'm out there being Johnny Rationality all the time.
John: You're laying science down even where science isn't needed.
Merlin: I would like to think that I'm, you know, scientifically woke, that I'm out there and I'm like, I'm seeing problems in the world and fixing shit with my mind.
John: Sure, science is the laminate floor over the plywood subfloor.
Merlin: How do we even know where the floor is, though, if all we see is the laminate, right?
Merlin: You can feel it.
Merlin: You can feel it under your toes.
Merlin: You can feel it under your toes.
Merlin: But, you know, I know on the one hand I do a fair amount of magical thinking.
Merlin: I know that I do that.
Merlin: I don't want to do that, but I know that I do do that.
Merlin: And I know that I don't think or choose to believe in omens and portents and thus and such.
Merlin: Bad signs, good signs.
Merlin: And yet I know I do.
Merlin: Do you have a lucky thing?
Merlin: I have lucky things.
John: I do have lucky things, and I have lucky signs.
John: Do you have jinxes?
John: Are you like Billy Bean in Moneyball?
John: Are you afraid to go to the stadium and watch the game because you're going to jinx it?
John: I probably do.
Merlin: I probably do.
Merlin: It's probably not anything that's even that, it's not even that sensible.
Merlin: It's not even, I don't even have like real world superstitions that make any sense.
Merlin: Sometimes it will be, I've thought that thought too many times today, so it's pretty definitely going to happen.
Merlin: That kind of thing.
Merlin: And I know that's an emotional and mental health issue, and I'll own that.
Merlin: But I do, I don't feel proud saying this, but in trying to figure out how to get your daughter consistent sleep, I'm willing to open my box here, is that I do sometimes wonder if there are perhaps unseen things that we cannot be aware of that could be having an effect on how we live our lives.
Merlin: I'm not married to it, but I'm open.
John: I feel like that is still basic science in the sense that we have just in the 20th century discovered so many things that we didn't know before, some things that we didn't even know existed.
John: That to presume that we are now at peak understanding is, I think, also like not scientific.
John: Right.
John: It's the hubris of the moment, the hubris of the present moment where you feel like history.
Merlin: You feel like we've got it all.
Merlin: We've got a whole bunch of books with all kinds of stuff in it.
John: Yeah.
John: History has stopped.
John: Nothing's new under the sun.
John: Exactly.
John: History stops with us.
John: And in fact, you know, political systems will continue to evolve and science will continue to evolve.
John: Of course, there are like 10,000 million things we don't know yet.
John: But it's so hard to situate yourself in a timeline where the future, and I don't want to talk about time travel, but where the future is, you know, unknowable and you can only see yourself in history and
John: Um, like as part of a continuum of history, but from a perspective that you can never have.
John: And yeah, I feel like, I feel like spooky action at a distance is not a thing that we can even imagine how we would discover the process, but it doesn't mean that, you know, it doesn't mean that some
John: Young Einstein isn't sitting in her garret and picking up, you know, like, wait a minute.
John: Time is relative or or action isn't spooky.
John: It's actually it's it's that right.
John: It's friendly action at a distance.
Merlin: Well, as you know, I'm not a scientician.
Merlin: But you look at the history of stuff, and you get somebody who gets a reckon about how the world works.
Merlin: And maybe that could be a guy throwing lightning bolts from the sky.
John: Sure.
John: Somebody Whitland, and it turns out the Whitland stick is really...
Merlin: And before you even understand what something is, you get to give it a name.
Merlin: And once it has a name, then it becomes an idea that you can share with other people.
Merlin: Maybe at some point you get evidence about whether that is a thing or not.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And then then eventually maybe you discover, oh, no, no, no.
Merlin: That happened because of this.
Merlin: And then you go, OK, now we know what this thing is.
Merlin: We give it a new name.
Merlin: We eventually get the ability to measure it.
Merlin: And then once we get the ability to measure it, eventually we get the ability to measure it more carefully and to refit it into our understanding of things.
Merlin: And I just I just don't know which stage of those things I'm at with some of my reckons about the world.
Merlin: I don't have a way to measure the spooky action in a distance that makes my daughter get up at 6 a.m.
Merlin: every day.
John: Yeah, oh, she gets up regularly at 6 every day.
Merlin: Pretty on the regular.
Merlin: This is that shitty time of year when it's just so goddamn bright all the time.
Merlin: It's bright at bedtime.
Merlin: We try really hard.
Merlin: We try so hard to encourage and enforce a, like, we're moving toward bedtime at 7.30, no later than 8.
Merlin: And these days it's not unusual for her to be reading until 10.
Merlin: And then she wakes up at 6, and that's not enough time for a little kid.
Merlin: So, you know, you start rattling the chicken bones, trying to figure out what to do.
Merlin: That's all I'm saying.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Well, you take two electrons, you marry them, put them in separate boxes, take them across the world.
John: They stay married.
John: We don't know why, but it may be electronic love.
John: Electronic marriage.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Are friends electric?
Merlin: uh it's an electron it's the same sex marriage too they're they're you know they're both negative it's an electron sex marriage whatever okay yeah and then if you bring in a third partner you call that an open ion like you bring you bring in somebody else you know but with consent sure and now you've got you've got something more we're open involving electrons maybe a bathrobe but but that's a polyamorous kind of molecule
John: At the atomic level, I feel like there's a lot more acceptance of a poly lifestyle.
Merlin: And that's a thing that we're evolving up here.
Merlin: You don't think that's normative, though?
Merlin: You don't think everything wants to bind to carbon?
Merlin: You don't think that's normative from an elemental point of view?
John: I think at the atomic level, a lot of things do want to bind to carbon, but not everything.
John: Well, it could be that it rolled a high charisma and everybody just likes carbon.
John: What I don't understand is how to apply that, how that is affecting what we think of as personality.
John: Right?
John: Like, how much of your personality, how much of mine, which we're always curious about, is this genetic, but at some level, is it atomic?
John: Our consciousness...
John: And our curiosity about from whence it derives.
John: Like, where does our consciousness leave...
John: But where is it not biological but atomic also?
Merlin: Something deeper.
Merlin: You're saying it's not just like I go to this ice cream place a lot because I like this ice cream place.
Merlin: There could be something deeper going on.
Merlin: I'm genetically predisposed to go to this ice cream place.
Merlin: But what if it is happening at a much deeper, where I atomically need to be at this ice cream place?
Merlin: And how would you know?
John: Sure, like we can kind of accept that when the moon is closer to the Earth or when the moon is full, although I'm not exactly sure how that would work.
John: The moon's always full, John.
John: It's all just optics.
John: It's optics.
John: That's right.
John: It's optics.
John: But we do talk about the way the moon pulls on us.
John: We can see it pull on the oceans.
John: That's measurable.
Right.
John: But what we don't think about is that there's nothing that has ever happened in our entire awareness that isn't affected by gravity.
John: We're bathing in it all the time and we don't know what it is.
John: And gravity is like, it has a real pull on us.
John: And so what role is that playing?
John: It's playing every role.
John: And we don't know what it is.
John: We don't know how to...
John: really measure it and we don't know how it changes we don't know like i mean does is gravity a wave or a particle or is gravity changing all the time under our feet in imperceptible ways that is affecting us i like that we're too close to it yeah right i mean you know from day to day are are your moods which seem because because i see all the time someone's moods
John: are a product of their emotions and they, and those emotions and that, um, and their then sense of what is reasonable and rational, um,
John: it feels very real to them.
John: Their rational mind is telling them that this is true.
Merlin: If you interviewed them on the street and asked them about the situation, they would very likely give you a completely different answer about what the right thing to do is, but you don't pause for a minute because of some atomic emotional decision.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, and it's part of kind of wrestling with depression.
John: What makes depression insidious is that it does not
John: It acts upon your rational mind.
John: So you can explain your feelings very articulately, and it is hard to refute.
John: It's hard to argue with because you're using that part of your mind.
John: It's just that it's broken.
John: And so underneath us, right there, like...
John: is gravity i mean i feel like all of physics sort of is like well gravity here i mean we understand it's like the thing or one of the big big things one of the major forces but it's the it's the weakest force supposedly and it acts upon the it acts at the greatest distance and is it underneath is it underneath everything is it the
John: Is it the static or is it the governing hand?
Merlin: You've had that experience where you're on a bus and the bus next to you starts moving and it feels like you're going backwards.
Merlin: I don't want to talk about time travel, but in that instance...
Merlin: So you say, oh, I'm a grown-ass man.
Merlin: I know what's happening here.
Merlin: That's just because of, I don't know, proximity, parallax effect.
Merlin: You notice that because you notice that.
Merlin: But the thing is, if you're on a green screen and you're on a bus next to another bus and you both were going exactly 100 miles an hour, it would feel like you're both standing still is what I'm saying.
Merlin: Even if you had 500 buses, I can't do the math.
Merlin: I'm not good at word problems.
Merlin: But I think in that case, you're saying gravity could be the same kind of thing.
Merlin: You don't notice the gravity because the gravity is doing something spooky.
Merlin: And how would you know?
John: So you look over at a hubcap, right, as the car is driving at a certain point, a certain sort of RPM, it suddenly looks like the wheel is spinning backwards.
John: The wagon wheel effect.
John: The wagon wheel effect.
John: But what happens if you look over and it has that appearance, but the person in that car actually has a spinner hubcap?
John: And the spinner hubcap is actually spinning weirdly relative to the RPM of the wheel.
John: But you have taught yourself that that's the wagon wheel effect.
John: But then it's just some trippy donk that's got spinners.
John: Turns out.
John: that's a huge that's a huge turns out look at all your fancy college education reading wikipedia about the wagon what are you going to do about that now maybe that's just a spinner asshole so maybe spooky action spooky action at a distance is just some shit that's bouncing off some layer of gravity that we can't know at this at this juncture and popping up somewhere else and it's just a ricochet
John: That's the simplest thing in the world.
John: It's being transmitted through this gravity pipeline that's all around us all the time.
John: It's a quantum computer.
John: And someday, right, someday somebody's going to have a better theory of gravity and we're going to all go, oh, it was that all along.
John: Or, you know, because it's so powerful.
John: It's so all around us.
John: It's so pervasive.
John: And it's, it seems like almost just that we don't have, that it's a thought technology.
Merlin: It's like trying to scratch your fingernail with the same fingernail, picking up the tweezers with tweezers.
Merlin: Like how are you going to do that?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: How do we know if we're living in a giant's thumbnail?
Merlin: How would we even know?
Merlin: When you see green, is it the same green that I see?
Merlin: These are the questions that science are going to need to address in the coming decades.
John: Yeah, what if our whole universe is an atom inside of the fingertip of a giant being?
Merlin: And now the thing is, what if you have an entire universe living in your nails?
Merlin: Which, if I garden or whatnot, I would totally believe that.
Merlin: It's just really very disturbing.
Merlin: You know what it is?
Merlin: It's fractals.
Merlin: Fractals.
Merlin: Eye man, the broad eye.
Merlin: In physics, action at a distance is the concept that an object can be moved, changed, or otherwise, I know you know this, or otherwise affected without being physically touched, as in mechanical contact.
Merlin: That is, it is the non-local interaction of objects that are separated in space.
Merlin: Pioneering physicist Albert Einstein described the phenomenon as spooky action at a distance.
Merlin: He was so smart.
Merlin: He knows what time it is.
John: Whoa.
John: He sure does.
John: But I don't want to talk about time travel.
John: I thought we swore we weren't going to talk about time travel.
John: So I sit here and I think about a friend and then the phone rings and it's that friend.
Merlin: Do you think that's like a deja vu type situation?
Merlin: Because I've had that happen a lot of places where I go, I have this sudden feeling of like, oh, this thing is about to happen, and then that thing happens.
Merlin: Now, did you cause that call to happen, or did gravity change the way you perceive the call's reception?
John: Yeah, at some point, it would be one thing for me to say, I...
John: I shook my moneymaker over here, and a friend in Boston who had the same moneymaker, we bought them at the same time.
John: My friend in Boston decided to shake his moneymaker at the same time.
John: That's one thing where it feels like there's some kind of energetic bonding within the object.
John: But we make a huge differentiation in the world of ideas.
John: I had an idea of my friend, and my friend also had the idea of me, and we both thought to talk on the phone, and who had the idea first, right?
John: My friend called me first, but did I trigger that with my idea, or did he have the idea and I was the one being triggered?
John: Right.
John: Or did you know, like and not to talk about time travel, but how would you know?
John: Yeah.
John: Did he send something out that that arrived at me before the call?
John: But we make that differentiation because the ideas feel like we're generating them.
John: They feel like they belong to us and that we are their source.
John: But are we what if the song is singing us?
John: Well, and that's the thing you experience so much as an artist, where you're like, I'm sitting down at the piano today.
John: I'm just going to tinker around.
John: And all of a sudden you write your best song.
John: Right.
John: And it's like, where the fuck did that come from?
John: How do you explain that?
Merlin: I mean, how do you regenerate that tomorrow, you know?
John: Yeah.
John: And is it, are there just other, I mean, I think a lot of artists, even ones that are agnostic or even ones that are science-based artists,
John: like Dr. Demento, we all kind of agree that sometimes fully formed songs come to us in an envelope.
John: Almost like a vision.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like a Kublai Khan type situation.
Merlin: It just comes to you.
Merlin: You go down for your opium nap, you wake up, and you've got an epic poem in you.
John: Yeah, except it feels like you're working.
John: I mean, you're not just sitting there taking dictation, although that is a phrase.
John: Luck favors the well-prepared.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And you sit down and you're like, this chord follows that.
John: And then you're like, this chord, I would never have done that before, but I did it today because I am creative.
John: But it happens so fast that you feel like if creativity is a thing that I can...
John: that i have perfectly harnessed or if creativity is a thing that's just the product of my own uh components why am i so incapable of doing this on demand you know and why when it works and when it happens is it does it feel so miraculous to me and it's just like why did i choose that but i did and pow how would you know i mean in my case how did i remember uh without getting a reminder i just remembered that it's trash and
Merlin: and I have to take out the trash before I get the reminder.
Merlin: Then I get the reminder later, and it's like, oh, right, it's trash day.
Merlin: It must be because I already took out the trash.
Merlin: How does that happen?
Merlin: Is that location-specific gravity?
John: Is that spooky trash at a distance?
Merlin: That could also be one in seven chance.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Oh, it's the birthday party problem.
Merlin: You know, another thing is, though, like, for example, here's another thing.
Merlin: I'm very interested in that idea of naming and measuring, because once you can name things and then name them more precisely, you can measure them and you can measure them more precisely.
Merlin: I think stuff gets super interesting.
Merlin: I don't want to get into spectrum disorder or time travel.
John: No, please, no.
Merlin: But, you know, I think it's super interesting that all the kids who would get tossed into this one classroom when I was even, let's say, in eighth grade,
Merlin: There's so many different ways to name and measure what's going on, and we're able to do better things for those students because now we have a way to name and measure it.
Merlin: I'll give you another one.
Merlin: I mentioned before, I don't want to talk about wearables, but I have a dingus that tracks my motion, like my sleep, and one of the things it can do is my dingus can tell when I have walked up steps.
Merlin: And do you know how it works?
Merlin: Because I barely understand how it works.
Merlin: I think it might be local gravity specific.
Merlin: Mainly what it's doing, supposedly, is it'll detect you just walked up, you just took 13 steps, and the barometric pressure changed a certain amount in that 10 feet.
John: What?
Merlin: Your dingus is also a barometer?
Merlin: It does barometric pressure.
Merlin: So, for example, yesterday we grilled out, which means going up and down a bunch of steps.
Merlin: Even though I didn't leave the house all day, I got in 16 flights.
Merlin: That's not counting going down.
Merlin: That's just going up.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And it does that.
Merlin: It does that.
Merlin: Now, see, I wouldn't be able to detect that.
Merlin: I wouldn't be able to tell you, oh, I just walked this many stories unless I was counting.
Merlin: See, that seems a little magical.
Merlin: We've had a way to name it, and now I have an easy way to measure it.
Merlin: And it's usually pretty accurate.
Merlin: What do you think about that?
John: I think that that is absolutely true.
John: I just spent the weekend at Lake Arrowhead in California.
John: Oh, did you go to the MaxFunCon?
John: Yeah, television's famous MaxFunCon.
John: Oh, good for you.
John: And Lake Arrowhead is at one mile height.
John: It is the same height up there as Denver, Colorado.
John: But it's not a city.
John: It's the Mile High Lake.
John: And you immediately, because there's no period of acclimation, you go from
John: the desert of san bernardino where people are having swap meets at old uh drive-in movie theaters where they're selling each other chevy truck parts and the air feels like it is made out of play-doh and then all of a sudden you're a mile up and you can i mean you wave your hand through the air and you feel that there is less of it and it it isn't just that you're tired and it isn't just that you're dehydrated and it isn't just that you're kind of
John: panting for breath, but there's just less of what we know.
John: I mean, there's just less of what we depend on up there.
John: And the squirrels are smaller.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, small squirrels, that's something you don't want to see, right?
Merlin: I remember the first time I saw a fat squirrel, it blew my mind.
Merlin: There's two things, and I don't want to be ping pong, but I spent a lot of time growing up in Florida where we have super skinny squirrels.
Merlin: I mean, they are crazy skinny.
Merlin: I didn't realize how skinny they were until my lady friend and I went to her home in Baltimore.
Merlin: And I saw a squirrel that was fat and black.
Merlin: It was super fat and super black.
John: And it changed my whole paradigm.
Merlin: Well, and that probably has to do with the specific gravity of Towson.
Merlin: And also the fact that—excuse me, Phoenix.
Merlin: It was Phoenix, technically.
Merlin: They have a Phoenix in Maryland, too.
John: And did you know that?
John: It rose from the ashes of Frederickstown that was there before.
Merlin: Some of them named the wars by the city and other ones.
Merlin: by the river.
Merlin: But in any case, I went back to Florida, and I had a whole new squirrel's eye view of, I realized it was probably, it was very normative of me to expect squirrels to be a certain way.
John: Well, you know, Florida does not have a lot of squirrel food lying on the ground, and they have mange.
John: Florida squirrels are mangy.
John: Mange, high specific gravity, you got water barter.
John: Squirrels can survive everywhere, right?
John: I mean, squirrels are fucking everywhere.
John: But here in Seattle, squirrels are the size of cats, right?
John: No kidding.
John: Yeah, there's so much squirrel... It's like a squirrel banquet here.
John: Seattle Squirrels.
Merlin: That'd be a great name for a team.
Merlin: Oh, the Seattle Squirrels.
Merlin: Seattle Squirrels.
John: That feels like a softball team.
John: Look at those little eyes.
John: Yeah, and Seattle Squirrels are super adorable, and their tails are so fluffy.
John: They're just fluffy up here.
John: And they're friendly.
John: They're...
John: They feel very domestic.
John: I have squirrels all over here.
John: I just was sitting in my kitchen making a pot of coffee, and I watched a squirrel do a thing that always amazes me, which is he was going along a fence, but he wasn't going along the top of the fence, which seems like, again, if you have a relationship to gravity like I do, and you're traversing a fence, you would get up on top of it and run along the top of it, which you see squirrels do.
John: They're certainly capable.
John: But this squirrel was...
John: kind of running across the side of the fence.
John: Like skittering?
John: Like skittering as though the fence was lying flat, except it was upright.
John: Just going straight across the side of the fence.
Merlin: Like the squirrel matrix?
Merlin: It's like a bullet time squirrel?
John: That's insane.
John: Yeah, like it's running up the side of a wall, except it's running sideways along a wall.
John: And I'm like, squirrel, why are you doing that?
John: It surely takes more effort than
John: than either to run along the ground, which you're only four feet from, or along the top of the fence, which you're also only four feet from.
John: It's an eight-foot fence.
Merlin: He must have his reasons.
John: He had some squirrel reason.
John: But he has the athleticism and the fluffiness to pull that shit off.
John: Up at Lake Arrowhead, the squirrels are the size of a teacup.
John: I think they're called the teacup squirrels of Lake Arrowhead.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: And they are freaky, right?
John: I mean, those squirrels can hide in a pine cone.
John: Which is not what you are expecting.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: Is that what John Sarcuso would call an adaptation, an evolutionary determinism adaptation?
Merlin: Is that what that is?
John: Yeah, I bet they evolved to live in a pine cone because that was the, I mean, you know, a pine cone would make a nice house if
Merlin: Maybe it took dozens of years of trying to sleep in different things before arriving at a pine cone.
Merlin: And again, we've got two different tracks here that are coming together.
Merlin: You've got the pine cones over here, you've got squirrels over there, and you found some kind of a relationship.
Merlin: Maybe the pine cone likes to be slept in.
John: Sure, both things were evolving toward each other because they wanted it.
John: Untouched.
John: Spooky action at a distance.
John: I feel like up at Lake Arrowhead...
John: So gravity waves, they have got to be different up there, too.
John: Oh, no question.
Merlin: But how would we even know?
Merlin: I don't think there's even a way to measure it.
John: The funny thing about going this year was, and you know this too from past experience, there are a lot of these things in our lives that, I mean, I used to look at a calendar of the year, and it just looked like a giant empty mystery to me.
John: I would sit at New Year's Eve and I would make some dumb pronouncement about the coming year.
John: But the things that loomed were President's Day, Valentine's Day, St.
John: Patrick's Day.
John: Dot, dot, dot.
John: Yeah, Memorial Day, the last day of school, Fourth of July.
John: Labor Day, Halloween.
John: Oh, my birthday.
John: And beyond that, I had no idea what was going to happen.
John: I mean, none.
John: And that, frankly, persisted well, well, well into my late 20s and 30s even.
John: And then when I actually had a career in music, it involved a certain amount of
John: Booking a tour in October, but we're booking it in April or June.
John: And it was this amazing thing of like, well, up ahead, there's this thing that I know is coming.
Right.
John: And it's real.
John: And so everything that I'm doing now is in the shadow of this event in my future that's unknowable to me, although it's been meticulously planned.
Right.
Merlin: And you talk to another person about it.
Merlin: It isn't like you said, I'm going to lose 400 pounds by flag day.
Merlin: It's like you actually talked to somebody else.
Merlin: I don't talk about time travel, but you were both able to work together to wrap your head around a set of dependencies that would enable you to be in some college town and not getting paid enough to do a rock show.
Merlin: You were both able to see past those signposts and granted your birthday to be able to put together a package.
John: Sure.
John: Somebody, and not just that, somebody in St.
John: Louis just wrote my name down on their calendar.
John: And it stayed.
John: And it stayed.
John: And that calendar went to the local alternative newspaper.
John: Even though it hasn't happened yet.
John: Right.
John: And that became a really trippy thing that I started.
John: And I remember, it was kind of like the moment that you go from having one key to four keys on your key ring.
John: It was like,
John: By 2003, I could not only tell you what I was doing in October, but because South by Southwest was a flagpole in a calendar, it became the first thing that wasn't on everybody's calendar, right?
John: That wasn't Valentine's Day.
John: It became the first thing that was on my calendar and my gang's calendar, but it was going to be there every year.
John: South by Southwest.
John: You knew what you were going to be doing during South by Southwest because we all went there.
John: And then there were these tours that moved around and these record release dates that moved around that you could see in the future.
John: But in the last eight years, I have planted so many of these fucking flags.
John: Sketch Fest in San Francisco, Joko Cruz, Max Fun Con.
John: For a while there, it was Comic Con was in there.
John: And
John: Planting all these different things, Seafair in Seattle and so forth, where I knew I had obligations.
John: It was the way my year was built.
John: And there were several years there where it felt like, well, this is my life now.
John: I have lots and lots of events in the course of a year that are cemented in.
John: They're like standing, standing events, standing events, right.
John: Where I can, where I can put it into my calendar app and then scroll down and say every year, like someone's birthday.
John: But then after you do that seven years in a row, you start to feel like, Oh, am I doing that again?
John: Like has now my life become a thing where, where I, I'm not evolving anymore.
John: I'm doing all these things.
John: Like I'm just making the rounds, right?
John: Right?
John: And that can be a bummer.
John: And this year, on my way to MaxFunCon, I had that feeling.
John: I was just like, I've done this a lot.
John: And is this what I'm doing again?
John: And I got up to the mountain.
John: And by the time I left the mountain after three days, it felt like everything old was new again.
John: Right?
John: It was a really good year.
John: And it validated...
John: at least that standing event, you know, that, and that's, and that seems to be now a new process for me, go around and check in with all these pylons and, you know, and have to have to re up with them and say this, you know, this isn't a part of, this isn't an involuntary part of my life.
John: I can uproot all these fence poles if I want, but if I go to them and, and they are, and they still work,
John: or they work in a new way, I guess, it's also okay to keep them and not feel like evolution into a new person automatically negates these things.
John: You're not just adding a bunch of compulsory flag days, flags day.
John: Right, or reflexively tearing it all down because that's how you become a new person.
Hmm.
John: It's been kind of a weird year because 2016 was such a shit show from start to finish.
John: And it washed over into the first half of 2017.
Merlin: Are you talking about with you personally or as a culture?
John: For me personally, for everyone I know personally, and for the culture.
John: Seemed a little bit cursed.
John: it really did nothing good happened in 2016 as far as i can tell uh but and and first part of 2017 it said i i really felt like is this our new reality like everybody good dies like everybody good dies and nothing good happens but now it feels like people are starting to pick up the pieces and you know we are living in a new reality but but
John: We feel maybe even more charged to build good things.
John: I don't know.
John: I don't know.
John: I'm feeling a little hopeful.
John: Well, that's wonderful to hear.
Merlin: I, uh, another thing is how you described that whole thing of like, okay, you look at your calendar coming up for the next year and you go like, you know, Oh, last day of school.
Merlin: I can imagine what that will be like for me.
Merlin: And Christmas, I can imagine what that will be like for me.
Merlin: But another, another funny thing, and maybe this is an old man thing, but is that as that speeds up and it's really felt like it's been speeding up since, especially high school, like, Whoa, Whoa, what happened there?
Merlin: How did, how did that go by?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And, you know, and like, for example, I use Google Photos and Google Photos will every few days like throw up a like, hey, relive this day.
Merlin: I mean, there's other services that do this.
Merlin: It'll be like, relive this day from, you know, five years ago.
Merlin: And I go, no way is that five years ago.
Merlin: And then I look at my kid in the picture.
Merlin: I'm like, that was totally five years ago.
Merlin: So the other side thing is it isn't just that I can look at my calendar and see how I will feel about that day.
Merlin: But more increasingly, you think about the people around you and go like, oh, man.
Merlin: She's going to be 10 this year.
Merlin: That's fucked up.
Merlin: How did that happen?
Merlin: I don't want that on my calendar.
Merlin: I'm not trying to get her smoking, I think.
John: She's getting very tall.
John: The weird thing about babies, too, is, and I think this has been a huge lesson to me, was when my baby was born and people would come by to drop off a casserole, like, congratulations, you had a baby.
John: I'm bringing you a casserole.
John: And they brought their babies who were a year old.
John: Hopelessly older than your child.
Merlin: And also grotesque.
Merlin: You know, I never hated anything more than a seven-year-old when my kid was born.
Merlin: I was like, how do you still keep this thing around at this point?
Merlin: This is worse than puberty.
John: These little boys are the worst.
John: Yeah, they're so gross.
John: And, you know, babies' heads grow faster than their bodies.
John: And so, you know, there would be these nine-month-olds or one-year-olds that would come with their moms to drop off a casserole.
John: And you're just like, what kind of encephalitis does your child have?
John: They just look unproportioned.
Merlin: Because you spend all day staring at a baby.
John: You imprint on the baby.
John: Yeah.
John: And then your baby's one-year-old.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And what's funny is when you look at a newborn baby, that baby doesn't look strange.
John: It looks like a little baby.
John: I mean, a little wrinkled, rotten little acorn of a baby.
John: But it doesn't look weird.
John: Right.
John: But then you look at a three-year-old when you have a one-year-old and you're like, whoa.
John: It's a grotesque.
John: Yeah.
John: And that continues.
John: So I go to elementary school now.
John: My kid is in kindergarten and there are all these fifth graders running around.
John: And I feel like, why are these people not building trail?
John: I was mistaken.
John: It's not a junior high thing.
John: It should start in fourth grade.
John: From fourth grade till they're 22, they should be working for the National Park Service.
John: Fourth grade to 22, so approximately 12 years of trail building.
Merlin: Think of the trails we would have.
Merlin: Tremendous, tremendous trails.
Merlin: And the thing is, at first it would seem weird that they've been conscripted into building trails.
Merlin: But I think really after a couple generations, it's just going to feel like a normal thing.
John: The thing is, you're bonded to your 10-year-old, or your 9-year-old.
John: So when she turns 10... She's fine for her type, yeah.
John: But you're not going to think...
John: I've had enough of this child.
John: I want to send her to work for the forest.
John: She seems normal and it's been a reasonable progression.
John: But from my standpoint, watching nine-year-olds run around, I'm like, isn't there something better we can be doing with these?
John: There could be a private vote.
Merlin: Maybe there could be something where when you make a note, maybe the kids have a barcode or a QR code you could scan, and you go, this kid looks like trouble.
Merlin: If enough people scan that kid,
Merlin: Trail.
Merlin: Oh, well, yeah, right.
Merlin: I nominate you as tribute for the parks department.
John: It's the lottery, except... Yeah, except instead of throwing stones, you've got to make your own clothes out of shit you find by the road.
John: I've always thought that that should be a thing that is true on the roads.
John: Every car has a barcode, and if enough people scan your barcode and put in asshole...
John: then your car pulls over to the side of the road and stops running.
Merlin: Enough people catch you speeding, and the governor kicks in.
Merlin: Guess what?
Merlin: Now you're not going over 20 miles an hour for a week.
Merlin: It's like if you go too fast on your internet, and you use too much of your internet, and then they kick you way, way down as punishment for using too much internet.
John: Yeah, they kick you down for using their service, I know.
John: But it feels like...
John: It feels like maybe that is a way that we could recapitulate the village where everybody in the village knows everybody else's business.
John: It takes a village to scan a child.
John: That's right.
John: We take away the anonymity of our metropoli.
John: I'd still like to have a little bit of anonymity.
John: There's a couple kids I'd like to send to the trail.
John: I mean, you know, don't go out is one solution.
John: But also, I mean, yeah, you don't want to be in a black mirror world.
Merlin: I'm not sending it to the cornfield.
Merlin: I just want them to build trail for no money for 12 years.
Merlin: I don't think that's too much to ask.
Merlin: Some of these kids are a real problem, John.
John: You know, the thing about kids is that they could self-select, because I'm around people all the time who, because I'm living in a world of liberal, like modern contemporary parents,
John: uh around people who say well let me go ask my four-year-old and see what she wants to do we always do that yeah and it's like it's good to take that into consideration but your four-year-old sometimes just wants to poop in their hand and throw it on the wall that's true um and if you're and you are the grown-ups here and so eventually you're gonna have to make a choice
John: And I think a lot of but but at a certain point when they're 14 or even 10, I guess what they want to do is a much bigger part of your calculation.
John: And I think a lot of 10 year olds just want to go do something like weird and mechanical.
John: And wouldn't it be great if we could also it's like all those dummies that are running on treadmills at the gym.
Merlin: And the energy's going nowhere.
Merlin: Yeah, if we could just turn that into work somehow.
Merlin: Tears and rain.
Merlin: Well, this really hits close to home for me because my daughter, I don't want to say that she's late to this.
Merlin: She's been doing it a long time, but she's into the Minecraft, which is a video game that's kind of like Lego.
Merlin: You build stuff.
Merlin: Everything is a cube, and there's different kinds of cubes, and you can make all this amazing stuff.
Merlin: So I'm just saying, at this point, she already definitely has an interest in infrastructure, and maybe we could leverage that.
Merlin: If somebody scanned her hard enough, five, six people scan her,
Merlin: you know, maybe she, maybe she goes to Oregon and makes a trail.
John: Well, and Minecraft does feel, this is again on the continuum of history and we're in the middle of it.
John: Minecraft has attracted so much mind energy and so much time and focus and like creative focus of such a huge number of kids that we had never, we formerly didn't
John: All those kids were not coordinated.
John: Their efforts... All across America, kids were building things with Legos, but there wasn't any central repository of their work.
Merlin: But they were building the Lego under a bushel basket.
John: Right.
John: I mean, gravity was just pulling them in their own little muddy corner.
John: Yeah.
John: Now we have all that collected energy, but we're still basically doing it and making a thing that just is a thing of itself.
John: It doesn't... Those Minecraft buildings aren't real.
Hmm.
John: And we're, I think, still thinking maybe in terms of, well, we're all headed into this virtual reality.
John: The doors are open, the garage door is open now, and we're gradually transferring our energy into this space where unphysical things do become real because they're real in this space.
John: But they're only not real to us.
Merlin: They're very real to the people that are making them.
John: Right.
John: But they don't do actual work.
John: But increasingly, if they're generating bitcoins, how do you separate them from things that are... How do you separate them from a windmill that's turning... That's grinding wheat and making bread?
John: And windmills don't make bread.
John: I know that.
John: So please don't write in.
John: But...
John: But I don't necessarily know if that – we can't know right now if we are all moving in there or if something is going to come along and say, wait, this was a cul-de-sac.
John: And what we're actually going to do is this.
John: We're going to start using this technology this way instead.
John: Or we're not settling this wild west of minefield land.
John: where we're building giant Eiffel Towers that everybody can come see.
John: That was fun, but what that taught us is this.
John: What that taught us is actually we're going to start using phones that don't have screens anymore.
John: We're going to go back to flip phones, right?
John: Back to mono.
John: Who knows?
John: Who knows?
John: How could we know?
John: How could we know?
John: Unless we wanted to talk about time travel.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: It's going to have to come up at some point.
Merlin: But so, I mean, is part of it that Minecraft is a little bit like the exercise bike in the sense that, like, do you think that should be actually, and again, I'm not talking about time travel, but do you think those should actually be generating something for someone to live in somewhere where that's another child in a Minecraft?
Merlin: It could be a squirrel who's tired of living in a pine cone.
Merlin: It could be Jesse Thorne who's up on a high mountain.
Merlin: Should somebody be living that or should we be harnessing the energy in a spooky action sort of way to direct all that activity into something else, some kind of an activity sink where we could store all this like a battery?
John: What are your thoughts?
John: That is what I'm saying, right?
John: The first one of these that we did was the widely distributed SETI work.
John: Everybody – all the nerds around the country set their computers so that when they weren't actively working on them, they were using their distributed power of all these IBM PCs with 128K to do the back-breaking labor of looking through all this data.
John: Data, data, data.
John: Data, data, data.
John: We don't have enough room on our Cray supercomputer to calculate all this fucking static.
John: And so it's we're going to distribute it across all these dumb compacts.
John: And so but SETI seems to be and, you know, and part of like the implication of the cloud is.
John: And oh, and then the next thing was file sharing, right?
John: That if you went on and said, I want to watch Braveheart starring Mel Gibson.
Merlin: uh i'm gonna find it it's it's available out there in the world type situation yeah and the funny consequence of that was the previous model of the last 200 years or whatever has been based on privation and the idea of a limited physical copy sitting in a store that someone has a license to sell you go in and buy it that's one less copy in the world not only was that upended with file sharing but in fact turns out
Merlin: If Britney Spears' MP3 was the most popular MP3, you actually got it faster, not slower.
John: Right.
John: Right?
John: Right.
John: That's not just a license to sell.
John: That's a license to ill.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: But, like, you look at somebody like an Elon Musk.
Merlin: What if an Elon Musk, I know you're a fan of his work, you look at somebody like an Elon Musk, what if he said, hey, who says batteries are only for storing energy?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: What if we made a battery that stored different kinds of things?
Merlin: The obvious thing would be that when you make your Minecraft Village, somehow, I don't know, maybe your attention goes into that.
Merlin: You get an attention sink, you get kind of a time battery.
Merlin: Are there other kinds of things that could be stored for future use inside of a potentially renewable battery?
Merlin: Is that a thought technology anybody's working on right now?
Merlin: Exactamundo.
Merlin: We know it's going somewhere.
Merlin: All that attention is going somewhere.
Merlin: Why are we not capturing that?
Merlin: If they're not going to be building trail, they should at least be filling whatever the battery is holding.
John: At a basic physical level, all of the typing that we all do on our computers,
John: We think that when we push the button down, what we're producing is a letter on our magic screen.
John: Okay.
John: But in fact, we're also generating heat that is dissipating, right?
John: And I don't mean battery heat, but you're pushing up and down on these buttons.
Merlin: Thermodynamically.
John: Yeah, right.
John: We're pushing up and down on these buttons, and they are tiny levers.
John: And they have resistance built into them.
John: Like, there is resistance to make it feel tactile, right?
John: We could be just using those tiny weird like unroll a piano key like in big and dance a jig.
John: But we have these little buttons because we like the feel of them and we like the clickety-clackety sound.
Merlin: And all those little letters and all that heat makes words.
Merlin: The words make sentences.
John: So something's accumulating.
John: It is, but what we're missing is that we could also be harnessing the energy...
John: The tiny little energy, if we had little generators attached to the keys of the keyboard.
Merlin: Sort of like when you're a kid and you get one of those flashlights where you go, it looks like one of those things mooks use to get their hands strong.
Merlin: You go, and that charges up the battery.
Merlin: Similar kind of situation.
Merlin: There's some kind of a potential kinetic energy that's moving through the device and is then getting stored in the Elon Musk battery.
John: Well, yeah.
John: So we think of power generation through friction as being something that we do on a large scale, like out at a hydroelectric dam.
John: We're running tons and tons of water through these giant generators.
John: But if every computer in the country had tiny little generators under every key, but they were all linked together in such a way that we were generating power
John: megawatts of electricity just from the action of our fingers pushing these buttons up and down, we think we're doing one kind of work, which is making words, but we're also actually generating electricity just like
John: Just like we are if we're running on a treadmill, we're actually generating power.
Merlin: Our experience of this is not diminished at all.
Merlin: In fact, we like the frisson, as you say.
Merlin: That's part of the experience.
Merlin: We like that, but then where's that going to go?
John: It's the regenerative braking concept.
John: If you take your battery-powered car up to 80 miles an hour and then you put on the brakes, why don't you put some of that energy back in the battery?
John: The more you stop, the more energy you get.
Merlin: The love you make is equal to the love you take.
John: But, so, if you then figure out a way to capture mind energy the same way, all these kids out there making Minecraft Eiffel Towers, I don't mean to suggest that we...
John: that we invent a game that employs that power to actually create something that the kids don't that they're not aware they're creating they're playing a game they wouldn't miss it they're already doing nothing to help society at least we can do whatever their pleasure is and find some way to put it into like a into a uh into a device a storage device a kind of a kind of existential hard drive or that they are building a larger structure that they're not aware of because the game that they're playing like for instance i sit and play
John: fucking threes all day now because I got back on the habit.
John: I thought I had kicked it.
John: I thought I could do it.
John: I thought I could go back and just play a game on New Year's Eve just to celebrate my independence.
John: But what if moving those numbers around was actually somehow also calculating something?
Merlin: I want to show you something here.
Merlin: I just sent you a link to something in Skype.
Merlin: You don't have to click it, but let me just explain to you.
Merlin: Yes, I have the Matt Howey problem.
Merlin: I have home automation.
Merlin: I have things.
Merlin: I have a brand of light called Philips Hue Lights.
John: I'm very surprised that you're saying this out loud.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I don't want to get hacked.
Merlin: But the thing is... Did you say hacked?
Merlin: I don't want to get hacked.
Merlin: I'm saying it like my sister-in-law.
Merlin: Every time she uses the same username and password and tells me she got hacked, she goes, I got hacked.
Merlin: I got hacked.
Merlin: That's because you're using... Here's the thing.
Merlin: I see three.
Merlin: That big fat button is usually the off button, and then you can have what's called a scene associated with it.
Merlin: Oh, wait, the whole thing is a button?
Merlin: So it's four buttons.
Merlin: Do you see each of the... No, I'm looking at it as three buttons.
Merlin: No, it's got four, because the big one, the one with the one dot, is actually a big button.
Merlin: Oh, the whole... Anywhere that's not a button is also a button.
Merlin: Put that in your battery and store it.
Merlin: So here's the thing.
Merlin: It's revolutionary.
Merlin: It's changed everything in the house.
Merlin: But here's the thing about this.
Merlin: If you're looking at that specifications, you ready for this?
Merlin: This thing doesn't have a battery.
Merlin: It doesn't have an electric.
Merlin: It is powered by, wait for it, kinetic energy.
Merlin: By using this thing, you power this thing.
John: There it is.
John: There it is.
John: There it is.
John: Kinetic energy.
John: Every one of our computers could be doing this right now.
John: The energy that we put into them.
John: Let's start small.
Merlin: Let it begin with me.
Merlin: If I'm doing my bullshit typing here on the keyboard, how is that not powering my computer and generating Bitcoin?
Merlin: Isn't that something that could be happening as a background process?
Merlin: Beep, boop, beep.
Merlin: Beep, boop, beep.
Merlin: Put it into the storage facility.
Merlin: When your computer is sitting on your lap and it makes your crotch hot.
John: Yes.
John: Your crotch is also making the computer hot.
John: Now, why are we not harnessing... Why are we not wearing, like, cameo codpieces that are...
Merlin: Okay, you're saying it's a near field.
Merlin: They're collecting that heat.
Merlin: Okay, it's a touchless near field.
Merlin: Maybe it's touched.
Merlin: It could be a touched crotch.
Merlin: But the point is they're in proximity to each other.
Merlin: And in the same way that you would use SETI to pick up non-existent radio noise that may or may not be an alien, in this case, it became a crotch blocker that is drawing that out.
Merlin: You're also, you're recharging the cod piece as well as providing a buffer.
John: And it's win-win-win-win-win.
John: Well, or you could build a whole... I guess, probably, with tools just around your house.
John: Why don't they make the whole suit out of codpiece?
John: It's like a black box, right?
John: Yeah, it feels like that would be like that suit that that guy was trying to make where he could go out and live with the grizzly bears and not get eaten alive.
Merlin: Have you seen the people in panda suits?
Merlin: In China, when they've got pandas that they eventually...
Merlin: They eventually want to reintroduce into the wild.
Merlin: The people dress up in panda outfits to handle them, and it's so cute.
Merlin: I don't know if it works.
Merlin: It could just be that they're furries, God bless them, and that they just want to be interacting with the pandas and have a special suit.
Merlin: But how sweet is that?
John: I wonder if one of those people goes into the panda enclosure after dark.
Merlin: After hours.
John: Panda reintroduction after dark.
Merlin: Hey, guys.
Merlin: What's up?
John: But I was thinking about a codpiece where you actually, it was like a radiator.
John: You ran cold water in one side, warm water out the other.
John: You're heating up your shower.
Merlin: Oh, it's like cold fusion or a Sullivan generator.
Merlin: You're able to, the sui generis, you're going to generate things like base minerals.
Merlin: You're going to get, I mean, coal.
Merlin: Coal's coming back.
John: Could be like Super Train, right?
John: You're collecting trace amounts of platinum and gold out of your crotch heat.
John: we just always throw so much away you know and we really throw it away really where is away have you ever looked at your body under a black light i mean really really looked at it yeah yeah you know it's not good i look like a crime scene the thing about the thing about a black light african-american light sorry uh a fat fat black light
John: is we use them in Alaska as part of a gold mining operation.
John: Are you kidding me?
Merlin: Because you see, as they sound dead, we see the color, right?
Merlin: It highlights it like a fluorescent Led Zeppelin poster.
Merlin: You just see it right there, gold.
John: Right.
John: Well, yeah, and you can put a blacklight, you know, and discern the minerals in what otherwise is a bucket of sand.
John: Ugh.
John: That's amazing.
John: In the process of laying there, being tormented by the sound of mosquitoes that are flying around you, you find a black light in order to see the mosquitoes so that you can kill them in the dark, because you're not going to light the fucking lamp again.
John: And then, because you're a teenager, you shine the black light on yourself.
John: Then you see all of the stuff that's on you.
John: All the dander.
John: that you couldn't see and the fingerprints and the crazy, like, things on your body that are glowing.
John: Naming and measurement, John.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: So you're seeing the unseen.
Merlin: Was that stuff not there until you saw it?
Merlin: Nay.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's always been there.
Merlin: The dander has always been on you.
John: What stuff is on me right now that would glow if I only let it glow?
John: And how would you know?
John: Let that light under a bushel shine.
John: Let it glow.
John: Let it glow.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I love this Philip Hugh tech.
John: Well, you know, the big mind fuck for me was when you sent me that keyboard for my computer that was solar powered.
Merlin: Oh, how crazy is that?
Merlin: I'm using one of those right this minute.
Merlin: Are you using the Logitech K760?
Merlin: The Logitech K760 is incredible.
John: I'm using it right now.
Merlin: I'm using it right now as we speak.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: The energy is going fucking nowhere.
Merlin: All that beautiful sun being captured.
Merlin: So I can sit here and look up pictures of the Adventure Time Minecraft mashup that isn't out yet.
Merlin: What a waste.
John: What a terrible waste.
John: But as we know, your office has no sun in it at all.
John: Sun cannot penetrate all the way back to where you are.
Merlin: You're backed by the toaster oven and the bathroom.
Merlin: And also, I fucked up.
Merlin: I bought the wrong kind of light bulbs.
Merlin: I thought I was being smart.
Merlin: I got the 1600 lumens, check.
Merlin: But I also got it.
Merlin: They're 6500K.
John: So they're super blue.
John: Too bright.
John: Too blue.
John: Yeah, no, that's blue.
Merlin: I don't want too blue.
Merlin: I don't want too yellow.
Merlin: This has always been my beef with these goddamn lights.
Merlin: And now I'm sitting here.
Merlin: I feel like I've just been taken up into the firmament.
Merlin: It's awful.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You're trying to get pink, right?
John: You're trying to find the, or as we say up here in the Northwest, pink.
Merlin: Pink, yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You know, you get spoiled with these ding-a-ling expensive light bulbs because you can make it exactly how you want.
Merlin: My new jam at home is I make the entire house red.
Merlin: It's like being in a dark room.
Merlin: Literally a dark room.
Merlin: An Amsterdam brothel.
Merlin: Don't have to turn on the red light.
Merlin: It's amazing.
Merlin: It's so relaxing.
Merlin: You don't realize how blue light is until you sit around in some red light, and then you go to the bathroom because you've got to spend a penny.
Merlin: Boom, blue light, blinded.
Merlin: Ouch.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But kinetic energy, John.
Merlin: I mean, there's no reason we can't be putting this everywhere.
Merlin: Like when you walk down a staircase and you're holding on to the handle, that should be generating energy.
John: Well, it will be once we get our all-over body suits that are, first of all, solar collecting.
John: They also collect all of the friction that we generate in the course of a day.
Merlin: Every time we hug somebody... So you're telling me I could get a codpiece where friction on the codpiece would actually generate energy?
Merlin: Or, in the case of Elon Musk, other things that could be stored in batteries.
Merlin: It could store emotions, but all I know is I need to get that codpiece rubbing on something, because environment.
John: Because right now, your arms are swinging, you're climbing stairs, and all that energy is just being collected by your Fitbit just to tell you things.
Merlin: It's sickening.
Merlin: And I still have to charge it every couple days.
Merlin: I still got to charge it.
Merlin: It's not charging itself.
Merlin: Like, if I were to do something with my right hand, I think that should get registered as potential and kinetic energy somewhere.
Merlin: It should.
John: You're swinging that hand all day, up and down, back and forth.
John: Why the fuck isn't it generating enough energy to keep itself alive?
John: Tears and rain.
John: So we put on these bodysuits, right?
John: They're probably also going to be like plus two against swords and stuff.
John: Oh, that's just something.
John: You know, you build that in from the beginning.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: You send somebody into space, you know it's going to be cold.
Merlin: You don't want to have to wear a spacesuit plus a sweater.
Merlin: Let's account for that in how we make the suit.
John: Do you want to spend $20 million developing a pen that can write upside down, or do you want to use a pencil?
Merlin: For example, maybe you don't want to carry your lunch around.
Merlin: Maybe it's got cargo pockets where you could put beverages.
Merlin: You could have a LaCroix.
Merlin: You could put a sandwich in there.
John: No, no, no.
John: LaCroix is going to come from the hydration bag that's down in the small of your back.
Merlin: You're saying you have on-site, on-board LaCroixization of your fluids.
Merlin: The fluids are wicked away alien style, and they pass through some kind of a high-pass filter, and that comes back to you as Pumplemousse LaCroix.
John: Or it'll be like your little pump-activated water fizzer.
Merlin: Yes, the SodaStream, yes.
John: The SodaStream, but you'll have little packets of LaCroix vague, imperceptible flavors, which are perceptible.
Merlin: Yeah, really disappointing flavors, but even opening the packet would generate energy and reuse all the resources of your body and possibly your lunch.
Merlin: That's a really good idea.
Yeah.
John: Even though we're moving away from a Minecraft universe back into a flip phone universe, that's why we make the suits plus two against swords and sharp objects.
John: Because we're actually going to be living in a medieval world, except the suits will also be animal characters because we're moving into a furry world.
John: Trust for the job you want.
John: We're moving into a medieval... Could you look like a panda when you're wearing it?
John: Yeah, it's a creative anachronism world.
John: It's going to be like... Hello, Governor.
John: It's going to be the Robin... It's basically we're moving into the animated Disney Robin Hood world.
John: Oh, what?
John: We're all animals who are also in medieval times.
John: That made Marian was a fox.
John: And are... Literally.
John: And we're all going to be Polly, too.
John: And we're going to be... And that spooky action at a distance is going to be cooling our codpieces.
John: Polly won a codpiece.
Merlin: Oh!
Merlin: Well that's more like it.