Ep. 259: "My Dump Buddy"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: I just texted you and I said, good to go.
Merlin: And you responded, real.
John: Real.
John: Wow.
John: Real good to go.
John: You've been traveling a lot lately.
John: Have you been picking up new internet jargon?
John: Well, you know, you wouldn't have to be traveling to pick up new internet jargon.
John: That's a very, very good point.
John: This is the provincial thinking that I bring to this conversation.
John: Well, I know you also think that the internet is in person.
John: And that when you go around, you're just seeing different internets.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, you know, corporations can be people.
Merlin: Yeah, of course.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Plants can be people.
Merlin: We have a plan.
Merlin: So how's it going?
Merlin: You all right?
John: Yeah, pretty much.
John: Have we not talked in a long time?
Merlin: We have not talked in a long time.
Merlin: It seems like a long time.
Merlin: I'm going to come up with a name for how I find out whether you're recording or not.
Merlin: And it's a process.
Merlin: It involves me texting you, texting members of your family and your circle.
Merlin: Is John okay?
Merlin: It's John okay.
Merlin: That's a popular text.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, you ghost me sometimes, which is normal, but I hadn't heard from you in a while, and I was getting a little bit frantic because I had to do a little bit of a reschedge, and I was getting worried.
Merlin: I texted your baby mama, I was looking at your Instagram, because sometimes I can get a little bit Sherlock Holmes and I can gather the facts.
Merlin: If I see that you're on the East Coast on a Sunday night, sometimes it's a clue.
Merlin: But I like to get confirmation from the source, as they say in journalism.
Merlin: But you had an extra wrinkle.
Merlin: You don't need to address that.
Merlin: But the other wrinkle is, which of course you could, I think your phone broke.
John: I broke my phone.
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
John: It actually, I think that it saved me considerable injury.
John: I'm not sure how, but the amount of energy that it absorbed.
John: If it had not absorbed it, it would have been absorbed by my body.
Merlin: Is that thermodynamics, John?
Merlin: Is that how that works?
John: I've thought about this quite a bit.
John: Is that exactly true?
John: But no, the damage that it sustained...
John: It didn't just transfer the energy directly through itself into me.
Merlin: You're saying there's physical damage, but then there's a deeper kind of Newtonian whack-a-mole that goes on here.
John: I'm wondering, right?
John: I mean, I am not a scientist.
John: No.
John: Right?
John: Although I play one on TV, and you do too.
John: Yeah.
John: But, yeah, surely if I had fallen on a phone-shaped piece of...
John: like hardened steel.
John: I think that that phone-shaped piece of hardened steel would have done a better job of communicating the energy, the destructive energy of my fall just directly into my body.
John: But this phone crushed and bent in a way... I've never seen a phone... I mean, I'm surely...
John: Surely on the internet there are websites just showing pictures of destroyed phones.
John: And mine belongs on there.
John: Are you bearing the lead here?
John: Did you fall down and go boom?
John: I did, yeah.
John: Oh, shit, John.
John: I fell at the dump.
Merlin: Oh, no!
John: And I fell from a great height.
Merlin: You lost your footing?
Merlin: Oh, no!
Merlin: Are you serious?
Merlin: Is this real?
John: Yeah, you know, the dump is very... So the new dump in Seattle... The dump is your enemy, John.
John: My gosh.
John: Oh, I love the dump, but the dump...
John: The dump has a very greasy floor and I got greasy grease on my boots and then I climbed up on this trailer and the trailer and I was standing on the, it was a dumper, a dumper trailer as they say.
John: I climbed up on the fender of the dumper and the dumper was all the way in the dump position.
John: So I'm on the fender trying to reach up and get the garbage out of the very top of the dumper.
John: And my boots just slid out.
John: Because, oh, what was happening was my partner was like, I'm going to move the truck.
John: And he got in the...
Merlin: he got in the driver's seat and i was like okay do i stay up here while he moves it it's gonna shake or do i like kind of climb down and in that moment okay there's a lot to cover first of all your partner is your dump partner my dump partner okay okay it's not your business partner or your or a special friend no no no a dump pal okay you got a dump buddy so you and your dump buddy are you dropping off
Merlin: We're not picking up.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, like you've never done that.
Merlin: Like you've never picked up something on the way out.
John: Well, sure.
John: Of course I have.
John: But you would have to be there to drop off in order to be there to pick up.
John: You wouldn't just go there for window shopping.
Merlin: It's not a goodwill.
John: No, no, no.
John: Then this is a proper dump.
John: It's not just like a take your old stereo down and leave it by the side of a thing.
John: It's like, no, no, no.
John: People are dumping.
John: The reason the floor is so greasy is people are obviously dumping a bunch of grease and other garbage.
John: Oh, dear.
John: So anyway, my feet fly out from under me.
John: And it's a situation at this point where I am.
John: My ass is.
John: Six to eight feet above the cement floor.
John: Oh, no.
John: Is it in one of those covered areas?
John: It is in a covered area.
Merlin: Oh, so that has tense degrees.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: Okay.
John: And there are bulldozers driving around and city dump trucks driving around.
John: Everybody's driving around real fast.
John: And I start to fall, and I'm like, well, that's it for me.
John: Because if I... I had no control, right?
John: You had enough time to realize, oh, shit.
John: Yeah, my feet were gone.
John: So I was... Ass over tea kettle.
John: Ass over tea kettle.
John: There was no... I was not going to, like, regain my feet, right?
John: Oh, fuck.
John: And I fall, and I land on the fender of the trailer, which is in a kind of, like, half up, or, you know, at this point, like...
John: I fall in such a way that I hit this fender, and the fender is made out of heavy gauge, you know, whatever, heavy gauge steel.
John: Steel, yeah.
John: And I completely collapse it.
John: It bends down and just is, like, crunched.
John: Like Iron Man hitting a wall?
John: Yeah, because when I went... You took a chunk out of it?
John: When I went to...
John: Later, later on in the story, fast forward to the other part of the story where I'm not hurt.
John: I went to bend it up.
John: I couldn't bend it with my, I mean, I had to like, it was not a thin gauge of metal.
John: But I hit this thing and the way in which I'm falling and the way the fender is kind of pointed at an angle and the whole, just the luck of the draw, it just sort of slid me
John: It just sort of put me on the ground on my butt.
John: But, like, I was sliding.
John: I hit that thing.
John: It crunched.
John: It, like, bent sideways, sent me down.
John: I hit the greasy ground and slid on the grease and popped up on my feet.
John: And I was like, huh?
John: And I was not in the least bit injured, not even the next day.
John: did i have any soreness it was just like huh well what do you know about that and then i looked in my pocket and my phone was i mean you could you could pour water into my phone and drink out of it it's that it was that concave oh my goodness the impact it's just it was it's just shaped like my body am i wrong this could have been way way worse not just your phone but for your behind and your your different parts even as i was flying through the air i was like i'm gonna i'm going to the hospital yeah
John: I mean, it all happened in a second, but enough time to say like, this is bad for me.
John: And it was actually like the, the, the five minutes following, I was like, I, I would, I would be not, I'm, I'm just like getting in the truck and driving away, but I would not be if I had, if I had fallen just slightly differently.
Merlin: Oh my God, John, this is a whole different story here.
Merlin: Oh my gosh.
Merlin: And so your phone, your phone bore a lot of the brunt.
Merlin: You had, you see a shattered glass, like on near your behind.
John: Yeah, but also the whole metal case is just like both flattened and also like... Concave.
John: Yeah, and just sort of like munched.
John: And what's funny is that the electronics still work.
Yeah.
Merlin: But there's no... A few things cause me as much anxiety as watching people use a broken phone.
Merlin: It causes me so much anxiety.
Merlin: When the Instacart person shows up and they got the whole spiderweb screen on like an iPhone 4, I'm like, oh my God, you've had this.
Merlin: It's been like this for like three years, hasn't it?
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: It makes me so uncomfortable.
Merlin: Do yourself a favor.
Merlin: Get something else.
Merlin: I treat my phone like a fucking Eucharist.
Merlin: I mean, I've never broken a phone or a screen.
Merlin: It wasn't Apple's fault.
Merlin: But no, I've never had that.
Merlin: It caused me huge anxiety.
Merlin: But you really... I'm sorry I'm processing this.
Merlin: You kind of dodged a bullet here.
John: Well, big time.
John: I'm a middle-aged guy, right?
John: I used to take falls like that all the time.
John: I used to do falls like that as sport.
John: Yeah.
John: That was kind of a bit of yours, wasn't it?
John: It was a bit of mine, yeah.
John: But now that would have, particularly landing on my butt and my back, would have been really terrible.
John: Oh, God.
Merlin: I twisted my back sleeping.
Merlin: last week and i've been uh stealing my wife had dental surgery and stealing her vicodin so i can sleep just because i slept i slept i harmed myself with sleep and now i'm treating it now i think i might be the opioid epidemic don't do it don't do it i'm the i'm the epidemic merlin don't get addicted to opioids that's my advice i heard it's not as bad as i heard a lot of it is the media blowing this up because they don't like the white working class is what i heard yeah there is some of that you know it's really about heritage
John: I think what it is is that states' attorneys general really want to sue pharmaceutical companies because they're bored.
Merlin: It's a Warner Brothers cartoon, right?
Merlin: And so, like, they're the wolf, and that's the pork chop.
Merlin: Sort of like cigarettes were in the 90s.
Merlin: they're liberal democrats let's be honest and it's the liberal like this is why trump won like lawyer culture and try you know trial lawyers am i right oh am i right equifax can you imagine what's going to happen with that equifax equifax equifax equifax they had a breach you probably aware of this they had a breach that was entirely avoidable 144 million americans
Merlin: basic down-to-the-SSN information out there.
Merlin: It's on the dark web now.
John: Heck-a-slammin', as Prince would say.
John: Heck-a-slammin'.
Merlin: Oh, this is a lot to cover.
Merlin: And so you put a dent in a fender with your phone butt, and you still had to travel.
Merlin: You went to the East Coast, is that right?
Yeah.
John: Then I went to Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C., where I was there touring the sites with my little girl.
Merlin: Oh, you went to see the sites?
John: I went and saw innumerable sites, all the sites, all the great sites.
Merlin: Aren't there some great sites there?
John: There are great sites.
Merlin: I would love to talk about this.
Merlin: We went this summer and I had so much fun.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: So I'm guessing you went to all the sites.
Merlin: What do we do?
Merlin: We did the, was it the African-American History Museum?
Merlin: We did, of course, duh, did Air and Space, saw the Saturn V engine.
Merlin: There it is.
Merlin: It's just like looking into the face of God.
Merlin: I love looking at that thing.
Merlin: And like, oh, and all the little astronaut food in that little cabinet.
Merlin: Air and Space, what else did we do?
Merlin: Oh, the zoo.
Merlin: We went and saw Bebe, the panda.
Merlin: Did you go to the zoo?
Uh-huh.
John: No, the zoo was just outside of our time and options.
John: Dude, if you ever get a chance, that is a baller zoo.
John: I used to live in Washington.
John: and uh and and used to go to the zoo as a kind of like they've done a real good job there i think they've got some serious dough their panda enclosure shit dog well the chinese make you do a certain thing even to get a panda i think there's a lot they call it chinese hoop you got to jump through yeah yep that's exactly right they were they're not going to let you get a panda
Merlin: just uh and treat it like a bear what are you a ling ling and bing bing they got the uh they still got the crate when you're in the enclosure visiting the page watch baby lay on her back uh baby's the young panda and and you can go see lots of things and you can see the crate it might have been ding ding or sing sing but whatever the original what was the original panda called oh ling ling was it ling ling then they get they get two pandas is that what we got
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: Chinese Panda Nixon.
Merlin: Panda Nixon.
Merlin: But you can see their little crate, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, anyway, okay, so what else did you do?
Merlin: So you went down the mall, you went to all the things.
John: Yeah, well, you know, little gal and I, we walked around, we walked around Capitol Hill, the neighborhood first, and we found a little, there are a few little old timey cafes, diners.
John: that are still in that capitol hill neighborhood when i lived there in 1989 uh capitol hill by which i mean the neighborhood that stretches to the east from the capitol building uh it's a big wonderful neighborhood of townhouses brownstones that type of thing and when i lived there it um
John: It was only beginning to be gentrified.
John: The first few blocks to the east of the Capitol were... The houses were, I think, probably kept in good condition.
John: It was where Congress people lived.
John: But then, you know, if you got much further than about 10th headed that direction...
John: You know, it became a poor neighborhood, and the houses were in decline—or not in decline.
John: They were, in a lot of cases, burnouts.
John: And then as you moved to the other side of Lincoln Park, boy, it was—
John: it was pretty rough, but it was the same exact housing stock, right?
John: The same beautiful homes.
John: It was just that they were, uh, they were not in any kind of repair.
John: You know, it was typical, typical American situation where people out there couldn't get home improvement loans and they didn't have money and, and the houses fell apart.
John: So I lived at third and D up there and, you know, it was like,
John: It was government town and all the bars were full of like young white people from Maryland wearing bow ties and with swoopy hair.
John: I mean, in some ways, the most concentrated collection of young assholes in the world was
Merlin: uh with the exception maybe of wall street yeah i was gonna say of maybe like parts of manhattan but no but it's an asshole attractor for sure oh my goodness i mean i had a friend who worked at npr and um a friend of mine from college and she said it really is a company town like everywhere you go like there's something people are all in this same general kind of industry whether that's being in government or reporting on government or whatever there's like you're never more than a you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an asshole in that town
John: Yeah, government adjacent.
John: And what's interesting is I think a lot of the concentration of assholes in Wall Street are from Connecticut and Manhattan and Boston.
John: Repotted assholes.
John: Whereas in Washington, D.C., it is the top assholes from every state.
John: That's the best.
John: It's America's assholes.
John: And it's the you know, it's all those people are every every congressperson or senator has all these interns because it's like a job that they give to.
John: their friends and donors from their own towns so these kids go to penn state or they go to wherever state and then in the summer or or for a year they go out there and work for their congressman and they're oh my goodness you might start out as a dick but you end up an asshole you really do it's a crucible yeah so fast but so i lived in that uh you know in in that like pretty protected little area well
John: And at the time I was stunned.
John: It was my first exposure to, I mean, seeing gentrification not as a general like, well, that used to be a neighborhood like this, but now it's sort of the whole the neighborhood is transitioning sort of thing.
John: It was as you went from block to block, you could see, oh, every house on this block is nice.
John: The next block over has a few shabby houses.
John: Two blocks over has like 30% shabby houses.
John: Five blocks.
John: I mean, just block by block you watched and then you would get out there where there was a block that was, you know, there wasn't a single house except there was one that had scaffolding around it and somebody was pioneering there.
John: Well, now you go all the way out and it's just beautiful homes the whole way.
John: The entire neighborhood has been transformed.
John: And yet there are still a couple of little stores, little, little diners that have been there the whole time and have been there since before the neighborhood even went into decline.
John: And it's just, you walk in, it's just like one counter, five tables and a menu that's like grilled cheese sandwich, hamburger pizza.
John: Philly cheesesteak.
John: So, um, so, uh, my baby and I went and found one of those and we had a breakfast and then we went to the library of Congress and we walked around and we went to look down on the reading room, went to the Jefferson library, which is they, so after the British burned the Capitol during the war of 1812, um,
John: They burned the library, and so Thomas Jefferson gave his entire library, and he was at the time, had the biggest library in the colonies, or I guess the states at that point.
John: He donated his entire library, and then there was another fire, and his books, some of them burned again, but they have the majority of his books set up in a kind of circle like he had his library built.
John: So we looked at those and then we went to the Capitol and toured the Capitol and saw all the things.
John: And then we walked, we went down to the Smithsonian, we walked all the way to the Lincoln Memorial.
John: And she was like a super trooper.
John: It was only on the other side of the Washington Monument when she started to say, this has been a long walk.
Merlin: Oh, so you did walk.
Merlin: That is so much longer than it looks.
Merlin: It's a very long walk.
Merlin: It's a very, very long walk, yeah.
John: And she said, I do not think, as we were approaching the Washington Monument, she said, I think that we should stop at the Washington Monument.
John: And I said, sweetheart, the Lincoln Memorial is just over the horizon.
John: That's where it's going on, man.
John: You've got to get to the memorial.
John: Yeah, and she was like, we've walked far enough.
John: And we got to the Washington Monument, and there was the Lincoln Memorial in the distance.
John: And I was like, what do you think?
John: You think you want to bite it off?
John: Because it's far, but it's also just right there.
John: Just past the reflecting pool.
John: Yeah, as soon as she saw it, I think she understood, like,
John: That's on the back of the penny.
John: And she knows all about Lincoln.
John: She'd sit and lecture me about Lincoln.
John: So off we went.
John: And it was great.
John: We had a wonderful time.
John: Although we went through the new World War II memorial.
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: I think I know that one.
Merlin: It's kind of adjacent.
Merlin: It's kind of not too far from the Vietnam one, right?
John: Yep.
John: But it has pride of place.
John: I mean, it's the most recent thing to actually occupy the mall itself.
John: And it stretches across it.
John: It's like a new feature right between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
John: And it's like a pretty enormous little amphitheater that they've built.
John: And, you know, I have a relationship.
John: with World War II as a conflict.
John: I've spent quite a bit of time on it personally in the course of my life.
John: My dad fought in it and all his friends did.
John: And I am sorry to say that the World War II memorial is an abject failure as a memorial.
Merlin: Really?
John: It's just bad.
John: It's badly done, badly designed, badly executed,
John: And it was really sad to me because you're not allowed to say this is a bad memorial.
John: It's an incredibly expensive memorial.
John: It was designed to be epic or to seem epic.
John: It felt like it was designed by a committee.
John: Like, we've got this space on the mall.
John: We have got to do something with a lot of whiz-bang.
John: It's kind of like a football field from the sky.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: It looks like a high school track.
John: Yeah, an oval.
John: But it has very bad access to it.
John: You can enter on one side but not leave...
John: On the other side.
John: So.
John: And it commemorates nothing like it has the one side of the oval has a big sign etched in marble carved six, you know, letter six feet high that says Pacific Pacific.
John: And the other side predictably says Atlantic.
John: It's a little on the nose.
John: And then as you walk around, there are 50 pillars with all, guess what's written on them?
John: Is it the states?
John: There's 50 of them.
John: That's right.
John: The states, all 50 states.
John: There might be more.
John: 48 at the time, yeah.
John: Yeah, well, but also there was Puerto Rico and Guam or something.
John: I don't think Puerto Rico counts.
John: But they got a pillar.
Merlin: Yeah, okay.
Merlin: I guess that's one way to do it.
John: You know what?
John: I did not actually go around and see if Alaska and Hawaii were on there.
John: That's very interesting.
John: And it seems like the type of thing where Alaska and Hawaii would be there, even though they weren't states at the time.
John: I call it a retcon.
John: It's a little bit of a retcon.
John: But and then on either side, there are two fountains, I guess.
John: And underneath the fountains are carved the names of all the major battles.
John: But it is insufficient, entirely insufficient.
Merlin: Like there's no the names of the doesn't feel momentous to be standing in it.
Merlin: Whereas the Vietnam Wall is kind of a creeper.
Merlin: You get up in that thing and it's like, ooh, there's something kind of momentous about this.
Merlin: Or obviously the World Trade Center one is kind of like that too.
Merlin: You really feel like an absence of something here in the presence of something else.
John: Although, I just went to the World Trade Center Memorial the other day, also.
John: Guess what?
John: It closes at night.
John: It's an enormous plaza, an enormous plaza, right?
John: It takes up the footprint of the whole World Trade Center.
John: And what they've decided to do, and there's nothing in it.
John: It's just like fountains and trees.
Merlin: I got a little bit of a pebble in my shoe because the security guard yelled at my kid for standing on the railing.
Merlin: Well, there you go.
Merlin: So I went there.
Merlin: I think you can handle it.
John: Yeah.
John: And I went there at, let's say, midnight.
Mm-hmm.
John: That's a good time to visit a memorial like that.
John: It is.
John: Yet, it is not, because they have decided in their infinite wisdom that it makes more sense for them to hire 40 to 50 security guards.
John: It's like shoo people away.
John: To walk around this park all night...
John: Telling you that you cannot step foot into it.
John: So you never forget as long as it's not midnight.
John: That's right.
John: Never forget.
Merlin: In which case you need to stop remembering.
John: And what's interesting is if they're going to hire those 40 to 50 security guards, well, they could just let them walk around all night and then you also could walk around.
Merlin: That's true.
John: But instead, I mean, it's not like, what are you going to get up to?
John: Start a campfire?
John: Yeah.
John: Um, if there's 50, if there's 50 people walking around, I mean, and so I went there to have a solemn moment because as you recall, I was, I went up to the top of the world trade center on September 1st, 2001.
John: And so when that all happened, you know, I was just 10 days from standing at the, at the window on the world and standing on the roof, went up to the roof.
John: Um,
John: So it was, I mean, not to make 9-11 about me, but it was a very profound experience to me.
John: I was just there.
John: And so I wanted to go have my moment with the memorial.
John: And at night, like you say, it would be
John: I was hoping to sort of be there alone and not have to experience it in a crowd, which always feels a little, also a little weird.
John: It was packed when we were there.
Merlin: That's why we should stand on the rail.
John: She couldn't see very well.
John: So, you know, just shoot out by these people who, I mean, there's no fence around it.
John: They're just standing there to
John: 14 feet away from me, and if you put your foot on the step, they're like, sorry, sorry, folks, park's closed.
John: Moose off front should have told you.
John: And I was infuriated.
Merlin: It's just like, wait a minute, who's in charge of this?
Merlin: I got a beef with this.
Merlin: There's another podcast I listen to where they talk a lot about Trafalgar Square and how Trafalgar Square, they've really cracked down.
Merlin: You're not allowed to climb on the columns and the lines and whatnot.
Merlin: There's all kinds of things you're not.
Merlin: They shoo you away now.
Merlin: It's like, you know what?
Merlin: To me, a memorial should have the dignity and the structural integrity to handle a whole bunch of things, including kids playing on it in a way that they don't understand they're not supposed to be playing on it.
Merlin: That's part of what makes it a memorial.
Merlin: It isn't like you're going to see the body of Lenin.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: A statue has a certain gravitas to it.
Merlin: Do you really need to shoot people away from that?
Merlin: It's weird.
John: Well, and it's partly security theater.
John: We live in a world now where you cannot – Ain't that ironical?
John: Yeah.
John: You cannot – if you like throw out the idea, hey, you know what we should do?
John: We should hire 50 security guards to stand around this place.
John: No one is going to say no.
John: Because if you say, well, 9-11, you've just trumped any argument against the thing.
John: And it's like, do you think somebody's going to come blow up this memorial?
John: What do you think?
John: I mean, in the course of the night that you're paying these 50 security guards to stand there, 50 people would come.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Obviously, no one's going to camp out there.
John: They wouldn't even have a chance to sit down.
John: Maybe they don't want homeless people there.
John: Well, how could they?
John: There's 50 security guards there.
John: You could cut the number of security guards in half and still have more than enough because you need 50 of them to keep people out of every single entrance to the park.
John: You only need 20 of them to keep people from camping there.
John: But it's also, you know, there's a sculpture garden here in Seattle and out an enormous outdoor sculpture garden.
John: And they have security.
John: I swear to you, hiding in the bushes, because if you if you go there with a kid and she walks over and touches the calder.
John: Somebody appears at your shoulder.
John: Don't touch the artwork.
John: This is an outdoor sculpture garden.
John: I don't think you understand what a statue is.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Which is closed at night, eh?
Merlin: And also, don't touch.
Merlin: Is it papier-mâché?
Merlin: Is it blessed?
Merlin: That's just weird.
Merlin: It's going to get ruined.
Merlin: Oh, don't ruin this.
Merlin: I just sent you a link.
Merlin: I admit this is a little bit over the top, but this is one of the most...
Merlin: Over the top, but moving, disturbing memorials I've ever been to.
Merlin: I just sent you a link to the Holocaust Memorial in Miami.
Merlin: Are you aware of this?
John: I have not been to the one in Miami.
Merlin: But have you seen, look at the photos.
Merlin: You sent it to me through Skype, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But you can just Google Holocaust Memorial in Miami and look at the images.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You don't unsee that.
Merlin: Isn't that something?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I realize that when you're trying to sort of, what's the word, valorize World War II, the Great War, the Good War, it's got to be very, you know, dignified.
Merlin: But like, I don't know.
Merlin: I think there's something to be said for like a memorial that goes there.
Merlin: Well, that one really goes there.
Merlin: It does.
Merlin: It does.
Merlin: But, I mean, I'm glad somebody went there.
Merlin: It's like I always used to say, even before I moved here, I'm glad Berkeley exists.
Merlin: Because Berkeley is a place where everything goes too far.
Merlin: America needs places that go too far.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Especially on our side.
Merlin: And I kind of feel like, you know, this is maybe a little bit, I don't know, a little over the top.
Merlin: But, like, it's very affecting to see.
John: Yeah, I bet.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, I used to get in arguments with people, if you can believe it.
John: You.
Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: About the way the Holocaust has been memorialized and World War II has been memorialized.
John: Because unfortunately for us, I think, the war was immediately followed upon by the brutalist movement and the hyper sort of modern, postmodern art movement.
John: world and so if you travel around i think yeah but as well as going straight into the cold war like we didn't have time to change our socks and we were going into the cold war but on top of that yeah you've got these these new architectural movements they ain't gonna get any federalism you know i'm saying right and and also representative art fell out of fashion so when you go around looking at the memorials to world war ii a lot of them are black donuts it's stuff that needs to be explained
Merlin: I buy that for the Vietnam Wall.
Merlin: When the Vietnam Wall went up, it had to kind of be explained to people.
Merlin: But I think it works.
Merlin: It has that obelisk, not obelisk, but you know what I mean.
Merlin: That's the Kubrick kind of quality.
Merlin: And I think that's very effective.
Merlin: But there are a lot where it's like, oh, there's a water feature and black stone.
Merlin: Yeah, black.
John: Okay, well, so what?
John: How's that about invading Poland?
John: And there's a lot of criticism to be made about the World War I memorials where 40 valiant...
John: soldiers, you know, carved in marble stand and look at the middle distance while they're, you know, around their feet are arrayed.
John: They're dying comrades.
John: Sort of like Civil War memorials where it really glamorizes it.
John: And it's like all those statues in the United Kingdom where it's just like, here are our fallen heroes.
John: You can make a lot of criticism about that, but there is...
John: like you say, you don't need to stand there in a tour group while a guy holding a clipboard explains that this is the Holocaust.
John: Here's why you should be moved by this.
John: Right, or it's impossible to be moved by this, except what it symbolizes is the unexpressibility of what happened.
John: You've got to really look inside yourself.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: So what it is, it's an inverted pyramid with like three Christmas... It's very intellectually moving.
John: And there are a lot of people that will defend that stuff because they feel that metaphor is the only thing that's sufficient.
Merlin: There's not any one answer to any of this.
Merlin: There's examples of all of these being done well or poorly that suit the purpose and don't.
Merlin: Some of them don't age well.
Merlin: But it's just a question of how well it's executed, don't you think?
John: Well, that is what makes the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin such a heavy, heavy, heavy visit.
John: Okay, looking it up.
John: Because... Oh, my God.
John: Oh, my God.
John: It's an enormous, enormous field full of, exactly as you say, black obelisks.
John: It's basically casket, roughly casket-shaped stones.
Yeah.
John: And it's open all night, first of all, because it's in Europe and no one is trying to keep it.
Merlin: This is why no one likes San Francisco.
Merlin: Everything closes too early here.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Well, that's one of the reasons no one likes San Francisco.
John: But so you go into this Holocaust memorial.
John: Jesus Christ.
John: When you're on the edge of it.
John: The stones are low.
John: They're just a few feet high.
John: You can sit on them.
John: They're like benches on the ring of this memorial, all around it.
Merlin: Looking at it from a little bit of a distance, it has a terrain-like quality.
Merlin: Is that because of the land's topography or because of the way they've been arranged?
Merlin: It's meant to look like that from the street.
Merlin: That's by design with the height of the stones.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah, looking into it, it just kind of looks like a big rolling field.
John: It looks like a parking lot for caskets, kind of, but it's very stunning.
John: Well, so here's what makes it astonishing, because it is stunning, and there are people sitting and eating their lunch on it.
John: There is a certain amount of like, well, this is just now a place that we, like if you sit down on one of those stones, I don't know about noon, whether somebody comes over and says, hey, get off that, but
John: There wouldn't be a way to do it.
John: It's right in the center of Berlin.
John: It's right next to the U.S.
John: Embassy.
John: It's right where the Berlin Wall used to be.
John: It's like where the Reichstag was.
John: It's there.
John: It's really there.
John: But if you walk into it, and it's meant to be interacted with, you walk into it, those paths, every single one of those spaces between the obelisks is a path.
John: And you walk in, and then the earth falls away.
John: And as you move toward the center of it, suddenly these obelisks are towering over you.
John: They're 15, 20 feet above your head.
John: And you're down in this space where every time you come around a corner, you can see all the way along the paths in either direction.
John: And it becomes very disorienting and very overwhelming.
John: And then when you're down in the center, you have no idea where you are because you can no longer see out of the park.
John: It functions like a maze.
John: It functions like a maze, although it's just a grid.
Merlin: But you're down there.
Merlin: 2,711 concrete slabs.
John: Right.
John: I mean, think about that.
John: That's an enormous, and these are big, big, big things.
John: But the way the valley of it works, when you're standing on it at the sidewalk, it looks like a hill.
John: Because it kind of curves up.
John: The tops of these obelisks curve up and have a topography, like you say.
John: But when you're down in the valley, you can't see up to the street because it's so down.
John: All you can see is that you're very disoriented.
John: And also, like, a little scared.
John: It actually accomplishes that you become...
John: overwhelmed and scared like scared um just your body naturally says like um i don't feel safe anymore like like can you can we get out of here but you don't know which way to go
John: And there are people down there who are playing, like not just little kids, but like teenagers and people in their 20s, stupid college students who are playing peekaboo with each other and running around because it is like also a space where you get enough uncomfortable that it becomes like, well, why don't we play chase?
John: But again, there's nobody down there to tell you not to do that.
John: And so everybody's interacting with it in a different way.
John: And you do kind of – your impulse when some 24-year-old runs past you giggling, your impulse is to kind of grab them and say, hey, what the fuck are you doing?
John: Like, this is a heavy space.
John: But you can't do that.
John: You have to just –
John: And that adds to your feelings, right?
John: You're not sitting looking over a chain surveying a donut trying to metaphorize the war.
John: You're having like a real emotional, not just momentary experience, but like the longer you stay down there, the more you're fucked up by it.
John: Anyway, so that's an example of like a modern memorial that
Merlin: that accomplishes so much kind of like the vietnam memorial do you remember when the vietnam memorial the vietnam memorial opened wow controversial incredibly controversial yeah that it was that it was too abstract and that it was not um yeah that it was there was it was i think it was fairly costly but mainly it was that it was it was too abstract and like and like goofy to represent this thing
John: Well, and designed by an Asian, which was very, very much a problem for people at the time.
John: Like, wait a minute.
John: Aren't all Asians alike?
John: This one designed this memorial to us killing Asians?
John: But it has become like a major, major part of the experience of Washington, D.C., and it's still very emotional.
John: It's very... Anyway, the World War II memorial is...
John: i would not say abject failure unless i meant it it succeeds at no level except at being an example of a committee decide a committee designed extremely expensive uh like hole in the ground and it doesn't achieve awesomeness you're not even awed by it you're just down there going so every one of these
John: things has the name of a state on it and each one has a giant um like bronze wreath on it but they don't they're just meant to like oh yeah so massachusetts okay what's next oh rhode island like there's no there are no surprises in it it's like looking at a place matt
John: yeah and so i walked out of there like very very very disappointed not just in the like i'm sure it's closed at night too i'm sure there's 10 guards that walk around it and tell you you can't be there um but but it really feels like a monument to our time certainly and uh and i guess at that level it
John: It's like when you go into cities and you see new developments, new housing developments or whatnot, and you say like, oh, that one was built in 2007 because it's the same like baby shit colors that every building built in 2007 was.
Merlin: I feel that way about awnings.
Merlin: Suddenly, circa 1984, 1985, everything had to have an awning.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And awnings were everywhere.
Merlin: And whether it was your local bistro or the mall, suddenly everything had to have an awning.
Merlin: You had awnings and atriums.
Merlin: And they did not age well.
Merlin: It was like a lot of actually Brutus architecture.
Merlin: Did not age well.
Merlin: Not very well designed.
Merlin: Awnings get mildewy.
Merlin: Yes, they do.
Merlin: Atriums have to be cleaned regularly.
John: Yes, that's true.
John: Atria.
John: And in most cases, they did not endow the building with like a cleaning fund.
John: No, that is the thing about a Chick-fil-A.
Merlin: um precious well precious few chick-fil-a's have their own endowment it's not rice university like there's gonna have to be there's gonna have to be a lot of bootstrapping to keep the atria clinking it's like a rack do you remember racks they all had atria that's right no you know what i'm thinking of racks i think i'm thinking of racks racks was racks was somewhere between it was kind of like an arby's
Merlin: want to be maybe a little nicer nicer arby's i haven't thought about racks in a very long time is there a memorial for racks i don't think so i went online not very long ago and looked up racks it's still around there are still racks you can still get a racks racks roast beef tried and true the regular racks racks roast beef you sound like scooby doo
Merlin: Hey, like, what do you want for lunch, man?
Merlin: Shit, dog.
John: Back in the 80s when my family ate at fast food restaurants, probably... I mean, it was still nice.
John: We would still get up, get dressed, go out of the house to go to the Burger King or the...
John: Or the Taco Bell.
John: We had dignity back then.
Merlin: Not even the Taco Time, but the Taco Bell.
Merlin: Oh, the Taco Bell.
Merlin: Taco Bell was pretty deluxe at a certain time.
Merlin: It was a pretty big deal to have fresh-ish Mexican food.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be that guy, but Taco Bell did used to kind of be better.
John: It was so good.
John: In the 80s, Taco Bell was a treat.
John: We would drive to Tampa to go to Taco Bell.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And we ate fast food all the time.
John: It was not...
John: It was down market, obviously, but, but back then the distinction was between, did you eat at home or did you eat out?
John: And obviously like eating out, uh, we weren't going to Simon and Seifert's and getting, uh, getting like fettuccine Alfredo, which was like pretty much had to be your birthday.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Um, or like your graduation family for 20 bucks.
John: Well, yeah, and maybe less, right?
Merlin: And it's gotten even cheaper.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It's so crazy how cheap stuff is now.
Merlin: You get five tacos for 99 cents now.
Merlin: It's crazy how cheap fast food is now.
Merlin: It's got to be some kind of jam up.
Merlin: It's crazy how cheap it is.
John: I think they walk cows into a giant spinning blade like the top of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: It's like the big fan.
Merlin: They've achieved scalability.
John: Yeah, they're like, here, cow, here, cow, and they just walk them straight into this thing, and pure hamburger comes out the other side.
John: That's amazing.
John: It used to be so much messier.
John: Well, yeah, you had to, like, interact with the cow a little bit, give it last rights.
John: Yeah, that's true.
John: Take its collar off and record its name and number.
John: Okay, all right, stop.
Merlin: They have a whole section on baked potatoes.
Merlin: You can get a plain potato, butter potato, sour cream potato, cheese potato, cheese and bacon potato, cheese and broccoli potato, chili and cheese potato, barbecue beef and cheese potato.
Merlin: I'm talking about racks here.
Merlin: Great taste, great selection.
John: I think the thing that distinguished racks was that it was the first restaurant of its kind that had a salad bar.
John: And it really brought people in because the salad bar, the the like go around and wow, look at this.
John: It's a whole thing of garbanzo beans.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: Look at this.
John: It's a whole thing of cottage cheese.
John: That was really novel.
John: And and.
John: And Racks was early adopter.
Merlin: There's also that there was a trend toward that eventually they pulled back from.
Merlin: But there was a trend.
Merlin: I feel like the 70s were sort of the silver age of the maybe the golden age of the salad bar.
Merlin: And then you had a silver age of the salad bar where it was like then it became kind of like table stakes.
Merlin: And places like Ponderosa, Bonanza, they shifted from being like a York Steakhouse style, like slightly upscale mall-ish food to being like, it was all about all you can eat.
Merlin: So you go to Ponderosa and it was always like, you could get a steak, but mostly you were there for the hot bar.
John: You are throwing some Midwestern brand names at me that I'm digging, but we didn't have any of those things.
Merlin: You didn't have—oh, York Steakhouse was nice.
Merlin: So York Steakhouse was Northgate Mall, Colerain Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Merlin: I think it opened with the mall probably in 72, and it was like our little—it was like if you wanted to go spend a little bit, normally after church.
Merlin: Before church, you go to Perkins.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Sure.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Perkins and I get strawberry pancakes.
Merlin: We didn't have Perkins either, but yes.
Merlin: You know the brand.
Merlin: And then often what you do is if you got a little bit of dough after church, you go to Forum.
Merlin: And Forum was the cafeteria.
Merlin: There was a cafeteria at our mall where you had a little tray and you get, you know, little green jello cubes.
Merlin: A little bit upscale, maybe once every couple months, you go to York Steakhouse, which had a medieval theme, which I'm now going to try to seek out.
Merlin: York Steakhouse was amazing.
Merlin: And my first grade girlfriend and I, we would talk about the date we would eventually go on to York Steakhouse and what we would each get.
Merlin: Oh, you had an aspirational date.
Merlin: Aspirational date with my aspirational girlfriend.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think she's a healthcare professional now.
Merlin: I was having some drinks and Googled her one night.
John: Was she your actual girlfriend or just your aspirational one?
Merlin: My first grade girlfriend's 50 now.
John: Isn't that amazing?
John: It is amazing.
John: She's always been my age.
John: You did go out with her.
John: It wasn't just that you.
Merlin: It didn't happen.
Merlin: No, I changed schools in 1976, went to a different school in fourth grade, right around the age that something like that might have even kind of begun to have happened.
Merlin: But no, mostly phone calls about York Steakhouse.
Merlin: Fourth grade was my first kiss.
Merlin: My first, Sherry Edwards kissed me in third grade during a fire drill.
John: Wow.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: Right.
John: She snuck you a kiss, huh?
John: Lockdown.
John: I untangled a dog that someone had tied to a pole and he had gotten himself tangled up so that he was just like his collar was just right next to the pole.
John: He couldn't move because he spun around it so many times.
John: I'm not saying smart dog.
John: No, but I got a bunch of people were walking past it just looking at it like, oh, look at this stupid thing.
John: And I actually got down and grabbed the dog, unhooked him, untangled his leash.
John: Put him back together and was like, I don't know what to tell you, dog.
John: Your owner will be back soon.
John: Listen to me now.
John: Look at me.
John: Your guy will be back soon.
Merlin: Did you do that thing with your two fingers where you point him at him, point him at your eyes?
John: I was like, here.
Merlin: I need two right here, buddy.
John: Two eyes up.
John: Look, you're going to be okay.
John: Honestly, I have no idea whether the owner, when he arrived, wrapped the thing around the pole 16 times because he didn't want his dog to have free reign.
John: But I undid the dog.
John: And when I stood back up, I turned around and this girl who was somebody that I understood to be a high status girl.
John: And I swear to you, I've tried to remember her name 30,000 times because we became, it was the first time I ever was actively flirtatious with a
John: with a young lady.
John: Wow.
John: When we were, we, we saw each other one time at a grocery store where she was with her mom and I was with my mom and
John: And our parents noticed because, you know, we'd go up an aisle and they'd go down the other aisle.
John: And when we would look at each other from down the aisle, we were just like eyes locked, like little birds flying around.
John: And my mom was like, who is that girl?
John: She's really, you guys are really like vibing.
John: You got chemistry.
John: We had chemistry, but I was standing there having just rescued this dog and she was there and she came over and kissed me.
John: And I was like, what do I do now?
John: What do I do now?
John: And unfortunately, I didn't even then.
John: This became a trait throughout my life.
John: Even then, I like so little knew what to do that I just...
John: did nothing shut shut down completely and was just like totally normal dur yeah but i never went to her and said will you be my girlfriend and she never came to me and said like will you go with me or whatever because we're in fourth grade right we're not in fifth we're not so sophisticated as fifth graders and then i moved away i did it also i moved away to to i moved to alaska and so she went on to she went on to a life so distant from me that i cannot even recall her name
John: Oh, my God.
John: And our class pictures, the ones that they gave us throughout the 70s, where we all stood in the gym or we all like lined up.
John: Yeah.
John: The little kids knelt in the front and the tall kids stood in the back.
John: Yeah.
John: Those.
John: Those class pictures have no names.
John: So they never put like all the names underneath.
John: That's a memorial.
John: Right.
John: So, well, now I just look at it and I'm like, I remember Thomas and Peter Kluge.
John: And I remember that girl's name.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: Otherwise, I'm just I'm blind when you're losing a little bit every day.
John: Well, yeah, but I couldn't have told you who they were 15 years ago.
Merlin: I sent you a link to images of York Steakhouse.
Merlin: The last York Steakhouse closed in the late 80s.
John: Well, so our version of that.
John: Oh, I see.
John: So this is like, yeah, it's done up like a sizzler.
John: This is a sizzler.
John: It's supposed to be like a castle.
John: It's supposed to be there's like, yeah, right, right.
John: In Anchorage, there was a clinker dagger bicker staff and pits.
Yeah.
John: And that was the medieval-themed steakhouse.
John: I haven't heard that one in a while.
John: Say it again.
John: Clinker, Dagger, Binkerstaff, and Pitts.
John: I don't think it's Binkerstaff.
John: I think it's Binker, Binkerston.
John: But the waitresses there actually dressed like medieval wenches, and it was table service.
John: It wasn't like walk up and there's a menu.
John: It was the fancy medieval steakhouse.
John: I don't understand why steakhouses and restaurants had so many themes back then.
Merlin: Well, I think it's a little bit like skins or themes in a video game where you've got the basic game, but then you can slap some adventure time on that.
Merlin: And it's not really like a large extra cost.
Merlin: You know, you've got to give it a feel like Ponderosa had kind of like a Western feel, right?
Merlin: Oh, God, look at these.
Merlin: Look at that.
Merlin: You look at a photo of your steak and you pick it by number.
Merlin: Say the number.
John: Well, I see here now, yeah, a lot of different kinds of pie.
John: I like a lot of pie.
John: Probably had some fresh baked bread.
John: There were a couple of places in Anchorage, like there was a one, I forget the name, but every room in the restaurant, it was big, big restaurant and every room in the place had a different theme.
John: So your waiter would come.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I got involved in this page about how to become a franchisee of steak and ale.
Merlin: I'd like to return to that.
Merlin: Are you talking about the wacky 70s where waiters and waitresses dress up and there's themes and that kind of stuff?
John: Yeah, the guy's got a straw boater on, but then you go over to... It's like Farrell's, but for spaghetti.
John: Exactly.
John: And then the guy next to you has a pirate hat on, and then this one, she's wearing a hoop skirt, and he's got a sock hoppy.
John: And all the fun you would have...
John: And you would get, yeah, spaghetti.
Merlin: I was going to say spaghetti warehouse, which sounds like a terrible name.
Merlin: I can't possibly the name of this.
Merlin: I went there for my birthday when I was 10.
Merlin: Spaghetti warehouse.
John: Spaghetti warehouse.
John: So that's actually a Seattle chain.
John: No shit.
John: That started in Seattle.
John: Oh.
John: And they had they had two different kinds of bread, wheat bread and white bread.
John: Really?
John: That would come on a little like a little sort of one of those pizza, the wooden sort of pizza plate.
John: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
John: It's like charcuterie, but for two kinds of bread.
John: Yep, and you would have two kinds of butter.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: You know, butter and dairy butter?
John: No, then they would have garlic butter in a dark ramekin, dark colored ramekin.
John: Oh, right.
John: If you were ready to go there.
Merlin: Did every spaghetti warehouse have a train in it?
Merlin: I thought that was just ours.
John: No, they all had a train.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: A street car or a train car in it.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: That had tables in it.
Oh.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I remember this so well.
Merlin: My 10th birthday, I remember this so well.
Merlin: Oh, they got Meatballs.com is their domain.
Merlin: That's a great domain.
John: Well, it's super good.
John: I mean, think about all the businesses that could have gotten Meatballs.com.
John: Bill Murray, Fan Group.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Or like It's Raining Meatballs or whatever that film was.
Merlin: Hallelujah, It's Raining Meatballs.
Merlin: Oh, I see Clyde.
Merlin: Yes, yes, yes.
Merlin: Meatballs.com.
Merlin: See, that's smart.
Merlin: That is smart.
Merlin: That's smart IP.
Merlin: Meatballs.com.
Merlin: It could have been anything.
John: It could have been like a bar in New Jersey.
John: I want to see pictures of the dressed up people.
John: Well, so Spaghetti Warehouse had, I think their signature dish, to be honest, was mazithra cheese.
John: They had mazithra cheese, which seemed so exotic.
John: It was like a grated sort of sharp cheese.
John: foreign cheese ain't no parmesan and they would make this and so obviously what you would get was half and half which was half mazithra cheese on your spaghetti and half meat sauce and you would kind of mix the two in a bite or if you were the other kind of person you'd eat a little bit of mazithra and then you'd eat a little bit of meat it was definitely where you went for your birthday and in Seattle it remains the place that you go on prom night
John: Is that right?
John: Starting during prom season, you can't even go into a spaghetti warehouse.
John: Is that right?
John: That's so interesting.
John: So many proms happening.
Merlin: See, this is also, this is a little bit orthogonal to the sort of Bennigan's.
Merlin: So Bennigan's to me was like, you know, a very Steely Dan, kind of like ferns and brass kind of place.
Merlin: But then there was that trend of like, what, Cracker Barrel type things, but like shit on the walls kind of places.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Spaghetti Warehouse is a little bit of a shit-on-the-walls kind of place, don't you think?
Merlin: Oh, there could be a loom or an old Coca-Cola sign, that kind of thing.
John: Yeah, but the Spaghetti Warehouse had—it was very old-timey.
John: It was very streetcar in the middle of the—
John: Of the restaurant spot.
John: And yeah, they would have worn gators on their... Oh, like a garter.
Merlin: Like a garter on your sleeve.
Merlin: Yes, exactly.
Merlin: So it appears... So did you ever... So steak and ale.
Merlin: was always loomed large in my childhood.
Merlin: You didn't have those.
Merlin: Well, Steak & Ale was like, again, it was a little bit medieval.
Merlin: You go in, the menu is on a cleaver.
Merlin: They hand you a cleaver, weighs a couple pounds, and that's got the menu on it.
Merlin: But it's not a sharp cleaver, it's a dull cleaver.
Merlin: It's a pretty dull cleaver.
Merlin: It's a medieval cleaver.
Merlin: And they give you the menu on that.
Merlin: So this is a page at Bennigans.com, which apparently now owns Steak & Ale.
Merlin: And this is a certain kind of webpage that I really enjoy.
Merlin: that was never written for a human being.
Merlin: The headline on the page is, thank you for your interest.
John: This is an active restaurant?
Merlin: Well, in being a part of the legendary family of brands, Bennigan's, Bennigan's on the fly and steak and ale, that's the interest that they're thanking you for.
Merlin: We are pleased to share some information about our beloved brands.
Merlin: Once you've read through these materials, we would welcome the opportunity to speak with you directly about our exciting franchising opportunities.
Merlin: Created in 1966 by Norman Brinker,
Merlin: Period.
Merlin: Once revered for its succulent prime rib, warm bread, and bountiful salad bar, Steak & Ale is poised for an epic comeback.
Merlin: Redefined... I think I'm doing Munch Squad.
Merlin: Redefined as a 21st century polished casual concept.
Merlin: What does that even mean?
Merlin: While retaining the signature elements that made it an American classic, the new Steak & Ale will once again set the standard for affordable Steak & Ale.
Merlin: Guided and supported by an expert operations and management team, qualified franchisees have the opportunity to generate immediate consumer loyalty by bringing back a beloved restaurant blessed with decades of goodwill and brand equity.
John: Whoa, blessed.
John: They just put it right out there.
Merlin: Are you getting what I'm getting from this, though?
Merlin: This is kind of like, boy.
Merlin: This is my 67 Mustang that nobody hasn't been able to start in 30 years.
Merlin: Won't it be great?
Merlin: Can you imagine yourself driving this thing?
Merlin: How great that's going to be?
Merlin: Does it have a little bit of that feel to it?
John: Well, the people that open franchises, that's always been very curious to me, right?
John: It's like, I want to own a restaurant.
John: But I don't want to think about it.
John: I don't want to think about all that restaurant-y stuff, like what kind of restaurant, what our menu is.
Merlin: It's like a very retired sports guy thing to do.
Merlin: Yeah, like owning a Pontiac dealer.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: You want to invest in this turnkey operation.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of like, isn't that the appeal to a lot of people?
Merlin: It's like, okay, I have $150,000 to invest in something.
Merlin: I want something that's going to grow and I don't have to do too much work on.
Merlin: So I become a franchisee.
John: Yeah.
John: And there's a ton of, there are other franchisees out there who are going to help me figure out how to hire a manager.
John: And then they got a great operations team at Bennigan's.
John: I bet they do.
John: And, you know, they're like McDonald's franchisees.
John: A lot of them have five or six different restaurants, and they're just like, I guess, raking in the dough.
John: Yeah.
John: You can tell a franchise McDonald's.
John: It's not the same.
John: It's really interesting to think that, well, first of all, who's going to go to the Steak and Ale website?
John: Obviously, they don't think it's going to be a customer who wants to see the menu.
Merlin: I think we should look at this, you and me.
Merlin: The title of the page is Own a Steak and Ale.
Yeah.
Merlin: They've got a phone number and an email address here.
Merlin: You can just let them know.
Merlin: You can help bring back this American classic.
John: All right.
John: I'm looking up steak and ale here.
John: Oh, well, no.
John: Bennegan's.com.
John: Yeah, here you go.
John: Slash Bennegan's.
John: Wow.
John: Oh, and it has sort of like a brand on wood.
John: So that would suggest...
John: Western, but then I see that the other logo is a shield.
John: Established in 1966, which was a heyday for medieval period.
Merlin: Oh, this is great.
Merlin: Oh my gosh, they've built out a whole site for this.
Merlin: Step one, why steak and ale?
Merlin: The new steak and ale offers a contemporary, cost-effective franchise opportunity with a highly recognizable brand.
Merlin: Jumping down, our franchisees benefit from a state-of-the-art restaurant prototype.
Merlin: Compelling unit economics, low cost of entry, contemporary look with iconic elements, warm, intimate atmosphere, smaller footprint to increase real estate flexibility.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
John: You can put one in anywhere.
Merlin: You can put one in a mall or in half of a gas station.
John: It's a small footprint.
John: Investment profile.
John: You get a polished casual experience at a casual dining price point.
John: Yeah.
John: Franchisees may localize, and they appeal to multiple generations.
John: So here's my question.
John: I know what a Bennigan's is, and I know what a steak and ale is, but what is a Bennigan's on the fly?
Merlin: I think a Bennigan's on the fly is going to be like, you know how shitty Chili's is?
Merlin: But then you get the even shittier Chili's next to Chili's in an airport, like the little booths.
Merlin: What's that called?
Merlin: Chili's to go?
Merlin: Chili squirts?
Merlin: I bet it's like that.
Merlin: I bet it's a little squirts.
Merlin: I bet it's like that with the Bennegan's on the fly.
Merlin: Let's find out about Bennegan's on the fly.
John: Bennegan's on the fly.
John: I just feel like you could not say that without making a little bit of a hip hop gesture with your hands.
John: Like a little bit of Bennegan's on the fly.
John: Bennegan's on the fly.
John: It's on fleek.
John: A little bit.
John: You hit it with some backwards palm out, like back of hand out accentuation.
Merlin: And guess what?
Merlin: Same phone number, same email address.
Merlin: Thank you for interest in being part of the legendary family of brands.
Merlin: You can buy a Bennigan's.
Merlin: Bennigan's is a high energy neighborhood restaurant and tavern that is redefining casual dining.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Again and again.
Merlin: Every member of the team bleeds green and demonstrates a 25-8 focus on supporting our franchise community.
Merlin: 25-8.
Merlin: They bleed green?
Merlin: Oh, they're making a connection to their Irish roots.
Merlin: They bleed green and they demonstrate a 25-8 focus.
Merlin: That's like, you know, the Beatles eight days a week, 25 hours a day, eight days a week.
Merlin: I think it's what that means, 25-8.
Merlin: 25-8?
John: No, they don't really say 25-8.
John: Yeah, it's in quotes.
John: 25 hours a day, eight days a week.
Merlin: Oh, the form's pretty long.
Merlin: You fill out a form.
Merlin: I'm just saying, you and me, I don't have a lot of extra dough right now, but I'm thinking maybe between you and me, Ken Jennings, why don't we go in on a Bennigan's or a steak and ale?
Merlin: I'm going to leave it open to you guys.
John: So you know what I just did?
John: I clicked on Bennigan's Franchise Opportunities International.
John: Oh!
John: And that actually has a five-step process.
Yeah.
John: Step one, why Bennigans?
John: Step two, growth markets.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, they got it for all of them.
Merlin: I'm telling you.
Merlin: You click on domestic, you get this too.
Merlin: But now for international, I bet that's a good deal more complicated for international.
John: Well, so here's what I see when I click on the growth markets map.
John: I see several Bennigans in Mexico.
John: Oh, Mexican Bennigans.
John: More than a handful.
John: And then one that appears to be in Ankara, Turkey.
Okay.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Look at that.
John: And one in South Korea.
John: OK.
John: Oh, at least.
John: Well, is that a shadow or are there two?
John: Oh, there might be two.
John: Two in South Korea and one in one in Turkey or maybe on the island of Crete.
John: It's hard to tell exactly because they won't let me zoom in on the map.
John: I know.
John: But there's not a single one in Europe.
John: I feel like you could put 30 of these in Saudi Arabia.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: Put some TVs up.
John: But then you look at the sign and it says American Fair Irish Hospitality.
John: Irish hospitality.
John: Okay.
John: When you think of hospitality.
John: Yeah, you go straight to the Irish.
Merlin: You really do think of the Irish.
Merlin: Current promotions.
Merlin: Well, you know, obviously this is going to be like, oh my goodness.
Merlin: Oh my goodness.
Merlin: I'm on the, uh, now I'm on the current promotions page for Bennigan's.
Merlin: The Yolo Monte burger.
Merlin: That's got some kind of a cream on it and it's got a sauce on top of the bun.
John: That's a very Irish name.
John: Yolo Monte.
John: Yolo Monte.
John: Wasn't Yolo Monte like on Hollywood Squares at some point?
Merlin: Center against the square.
John: All right.
John: Tell me, do you think, think about you, me, owning a franchise restaurant.
Merlin: Okay, let's start with the relationship, not the property, right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: We'll find the property that matches what it is that we're about.
John: I think you and if the two of us were going to open a franchise restaurant, we would pick a third city that's neither of our cities.
John: We could put one in Missoula, Montana, let's say.
Merlin: Is it selfish for us to want the kinds of foods that we like to have at certain times of day?
Merlin: Because I feel like a big part is a passion project where you're not just going to go into this as an investor.
Merlin: This is a lifestyle job.
Merlin: If we're going to really put our back into it, there should probably be some dim sum.
John: So you want to put this in a city where you can go and kind of be the boss, be the big wheel that rolls in?
Merlin: We can take it and turn it.
Merlin: What if we just don't care and it's really just about making money?
Merlin: That's another way to look at it.
John: Yeah, like it's in Winnemucca, Nevada, and neither of us ever go there.
John: Put it in Bakersfield.
John: Or we could open two of them, one in Seattle and one in San Francisco.
John: I just wonder if you're the owner of a Bennigan's on the fly.
John: Yeah.
John: Can you be one of those people that's like, well, that's the boss's table.
John: Like the table always has a reserved table.
John: But tent on it, and you're just like, we keep that for the boss because he comes in all the time and wants a Malibu chicken.
Merlin: I understand what you're saying.
Merlin: You're saying, look, I'm more than the franchisee.
Merlin: I'm the owner.
Merlin: If I don't want to have potatoes on this menu, guess what?
Merlin: No potatoes on the menu.
Merlin: This is the way John likes it.
Merlin: You cook the burgers the way you like it.
John: The only reason I would open a restaurant is to give myself somewhere to go every day.
Merlin: You get a big table, you get a banquette, like a big curvy banquette that's always reserved for John.
Merlin: You sit in there.
Merlin: Sometimes people come over and they ask you a question.
John: Sometimes you sign a piece of paper.
Merlin: You leave your papers there, your ashtrays throughout the day.
Merlin: Sorry, you can't smoke in here, can't I?
John: Yeah, people come over and they're like, John, I know I owe you 50 grand.
John: I'm going to pay you in installments.
John: And you're like, no, I'm afraid you're not.
John: I'm afraid you're going to give me that 50 grand by Friday.
John: And then a guy, a really big guy in a nail-fitting suit.
John: Rocco comes out.
John: He breaks his knuckles but gives him a breadstick.
John: Yeah, he kind of stands.
John: He takes two steps closer to him, sort of like the mountain in Game of Thrones.
Merlin: Oh, exactly.
Merlin: You stepped a little bit too close to the queen.
John: Yeah, he never says anything.
Merlin: He just takes a step forward.
Merlin: Now, what if you had a dais?
Merlin: What if you had like a raised area, not precisely an iron throne, but like an iron banquette?
Merlin: What if you had an area that was just for John and the people that he invited into court?
John: It would absolutely be a little bit higher than anything else in the room.
John: Maybe just like four inches higher.
Merlin: It's like when you go to the pharmacy, right?
Merlin: Just enough to be kind of annoying a little bit higher.
John: Yeah.
John: And then the chairs on the other side of the table all have their legs cut down like just an inch.
Merlin: All of the customers' chairs have the diagonals of legs just like an eighth of an inch shorter, so you're never quite comfortable.
John: Yeah, they're always kind of sitting there.
John: Well, you know, you want your customers...
John: You want your customers to come back.
John: It's just the people that are sitting close to you.
Merlin: Oh, it was close to you.
Merlin: Well, I think it's a good idea for you to keep everybody on their toes.
Merlin: They go in thinking this is going to be just another Bennigan's on the fly.
Merlin: That's the dance.
Merlin: There's a man with piles of paper smoking cigarettes and eating dim sum.
John: And also wearing sunglasses that are tinted at the top but not at the bottom.
John: It's kind of like a Jim Jones franchise opportunity.
John: And they keep like three times a day they come out and put a steak in front of you.
Merlin: It's a little bit like feeding a male lion.
John: You eat about half of it and then you push it away.
John: Light a butt.
John: Sir, sir.
John: That's the only reason I would open a Bennigan's on the fly, to give myself that.
Merlin: Would the waiters be allowed to vape?
John: Not during, no, not during the chip.
John: Not during working hours.
John: But you can stand in the back of the kitchen.
John: You stand in the back of the kitchen and vape your heart.
Merlin: Back of the kitchen, they got fans back there.
Merlin: But also, I like those kinds of places that are like the low... What you're describing, though, I've seen a lot at like, you know, one-owner, one-off restaurants where there will be a table that the owner always sits at and basically conducts business from.
Merlin: I think you could fuck this up real good, regardless, you know?
Merlin: I like the idea of a turnkey operation, though.
Merlin: Maybe someplace that used to be a Pizza Hut and then it was a dentist's office and now you're going to make it into John's Restaurant.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Or, yeah, an old Taco Bell where the roof line or all the time in Washington, you see like really old international houses of pancakes where they had that super tall blue roof.
John: Oh, yes.
John: Unmistakable.
John: But, you know, like the A-frame tall roof.
Merlin: But now it's a Thai restaurant.
Merlin: There's many sites like this.
Merlin: One I'm looking at right now is used to be a Pizza Hut dot blogspot dot com.
Merlin: Where it has kind of that red witch's hat roof.
Merlin: Like Taco Bell, IHOP, and Pizza Hut, you can't wash that off.
Merlin: It's always, I mean, no matter how much good dental work you do in there, it's always going to be a Taco Bell.
John: Used to be a pizza.
John: This is the kind of website that makes me so happy.
Merlin: Oh, God, John.
Merlin: Used to be a pizza hut.
Merlin: I found it.
Merlin: Go to notfoolinganybody.com.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: Used to be a Pizza Hut has a world map covered with dots where you can go to all the used to be Pizza Huts.
John: What was the other one?
Merlin: Clear your calendar.
Merlin: Notfoolinganybody.com.
Merlin: And then you click on original restaurants.
Merlin: Show me everything that used to be an Arby's.
Merlin: Show me everything that used to be a KFC.
Merlin: This is a very important website.
Merlin: This could really guide us.
Merlin: Who are these people?
Merlin: Do you think Ken Jennings would want to be maybe like a silent partner on this, do you think?
John: You know, he guards his brand pretty carefully, right?
John: He doesn't want to just go out and open a smoke mat.
Merlin: What if we agreed to be silent, too?
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: You know, he's silent.
Merlin: We're silent.
Merlin: We don't even talk about it.
Merlin: He just gets a check in a couple years.
John: Merlin, I forgot entirely about photo mats.
Merlin: Now, what became a photo mat?
Merlin: The smoke mat.
Merlin: The smoke mat, which is just like a smoke shop.
Merlin: The photo mat for cigarettes.
Merlin: Yeah, you go up, get a cigar.
John: It's a drive-up cigarette store.
John: Oh, look at that.
John: I love photo mats.
John: NotFoolingAnybody.com has a manifesto.
John: It is not without the bitter taste of self-awareness, specifically about the overwhelmingly crass and commercial and indeed downtrodden and dreary, bleakly suburban and economically grim nature of the content of this site that we at NFA, Not Fooling Anybody, embark...
John: On our quest to document bad conversions.
John: Oh, this is a labor of love for some nut job and his friends.
John: God bless him.
John: I know a gal who has an Instagram page, which is just called street seats.
John: And what she wants is you to send her any picture of a chair or couch that someone has put out on the sidewalk.
Oh.
Merlin: Oh, there's a Tumblr called Want to Take a Nap?
Merlin: And it's just mattresses on the street.
Merlin: I love these things.
Merlin: Try the field guide.
Merlin: A field guide to common bad conversions.
Merlin: They don't have racks.
Merlin: They do have IHOP.
Merlin: You've got to be blind to miss an IHOP.
Merlin: Those ginormous A-frame restaurants make excellent conversions into all kinds of strange things from car dealerships to supermarkets.
Merlin: Hardee's and Carl's Jr.
Merlin: Friendly's.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Long John Silver's.
Merlin: Dairy Queen.
Merlin: Oh, they have Ponderosa's here.
Merlin: You were talking about them.
Merlin: Ponderosa?
Merlin: I think they're still around.
Merlin: These lie abandoned around the city as well as the open range.
Merlin: Look for high vertical beige.
Merlin: Oh, yes, of course.
Merlin: It's very distinctive.
Merlin: And they've got a very helpful little guide here.
Merlin: Oh, the Kettering Chiropractic Center in Ohio.
Merlin: That used to be a Ponderosa.
John: Here's a question I've always wanted to ask somebody, and there's really nobody better than you to ask.
John: Yeah, please.
John: What is the deal with Wienerschnitzel?
Merlin: I've never I've never known.
Merlin: That sounds like one of those things they mention in a movie based in like L.A.
Merlin: And I just don't know what it means.
Merlin: Is it a hot dog place?
John: It's a hot dog place.
John: But the problem is.
John: Wienerschnitzel, or, if you will, Wienerschnitzel.
Merlin: That's an actual dish.
Merlin: Is that veal?
Merlin: It's like a pounded pork cutlet.
Merlin: That's it.
Merlin: There you go.
Merlin: But it is an actual meal.
Merlin: It's an actual Wienerschnitzel, the Austrian dish.
Merlin: is not a hot dog or a sausage of any kind.
Merlin: I would go and eat this cutlet out of place, but if I went in expecting this cutlet and got the offer of hot dogs, I think I'd be sorely disappointed.
John: Yeah, someone in a weird hat that's got hot dogs and lemonade, which were the two things that they served at Wieners Mitzel.
Merlin: That's so strange.
John: And you're just like, if you want to put the word wiener in something, go right ahead.
John: Call it a wiener pop or a wiener... I would call it, you know what?
Merlin: I think what's the German... Is it Kasselischloss?
Merlin: Maybe Wienerschloss would be good.
Merlin: Wienerschloss.
Merlin: We should start a Wienerschloss.
Merlin: But also we only serve Wienerschnitzel.
Merlin: We should put... Wienerschloss.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes, and it serves Wienerschnitzel.
Merlin: We'll put it right next.
Merlin: If anybody wants to draw that up as a concept...
Merlin: We're willing to franchise it.
Merlin: That would be fine.
Merlin: We may.
Merlin: We're looking at a lot of offers right now.
Merlin: As you can tell, we still got a lot of ideas in the air right now.
John: I wish we knew somebody that could do internet coding.
John: Maybe we could get Dan Benjamin to do it.
John: Code us up a site, Wienerschloss.com.
John: He would call it the Wienerschloss method.
John: We put it right next to Wienerschnitzel, except all we serve is Wienerschnitzel.
John: Yeah, take that.
John: And then they're like, oh, we got hot dogs.
John: It's like, boy, this is not.
John: Sorry, buddies.
John: Who's disappointed now, right?
Merlin: You come into our place, you think it's going to be hot dogs.
Merlin: Fuck that.
John: You're going to get a pounded cutlet.
John: Pork pounded cutlet breaded and fried with an egg on it.
John: The thing is that if you go across Europe, a schnitzel...
John: is the basic food item in any place like anytime you walk into a pub and sit down and open the menu there are six kinds of schnitzel it's the first thing on the menu this is there are many cultures that feature something like a schnitzel yes
John: Schnitzel, schnitzel, everywhere.
Merlin: Schnitzel, schnitzel, schnitzel.
John: That famous song sung by Heidi Gruber Schmitz, which was It's Raining Schnitzel.
John: Hallelujah, It's Raining Schnitzel.
John: But the Wiener Schnitzel, as you go down, the Wiener Schnitzel is the last thing on the menu and it always has an egg on it or whatever.
John: So you need to go.
Merlin: No, no.
John: Oh, tonkatsu.
Merlin: Yeah, that would count.
Merlin: Tonkatsu.
Merlin: I could see that counting.
Merlin: It's a schnitzel.
Merlin: That's a kind of a schnitzel.
Merlin: We're skipping over.
Merlin: We're really burying the lead.
Merlin: What are you going to do about a phone now?
Merlin: I mean, I realize this is probably should save this for the next episode because this could be a whole thing.
Merlin: But have you made a decision about what to do next about a phone?
John: So here's the thing.
John: I lost the phone.
John: I decided I was going to go without a phone.
John: See how that worked.
John: See what happened.
John: Because I needed to get the phone out of my head.
John: Because of the energy problems.
John: Well, and just like I'm just like I can't.
John: You're thinking about your phone all the time, even when you're not looking at it.
John: So you're walking around and like 10% of your head is just always in your phone.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was just noticing like anytime I had a moment, I looked at my phone.
John: Anytime I would come in the house and I'd be like, what a tough day.
John: And my kid would go get a book and I would go look at my phone.
John: And then she would come out, she'd be done with her book and she'd come out and say like, Hey, and I'd still be looking at the phone.
John: So I left the phone and I was like, no phone.
John: How do you like that?
John: And it was tough.
John: It would leave it.
John: And it was tough because in the course of a day, there are always a couple of times when it's like, okay, I'm in transit now.
John: I'm leaving my house and I'm going to somewhere and now nobody can get in touch with me.
John: And that's how we lived our entire lives.
John: But now it is an impossible problem for people.
Yeah.
John: And then I was getting texts from a lot of people, including you.
John: And people were like, are you OK?
John: And I got a couple of Instagram messages that were like, hey, buddy, what's going on in your life?
John: Yeah.
John: Notice you haven't posted in a while.
John: And I was like, I'm fine with this.
John: I am fine with this because I don't have this monkey on my back.
John: No more monkey.
John: And then I said.
Merlin: And the thing is, you want cold turkey.
Merlin: It's sort of like if you get really, really sick and you stop eating and drinking coffee, you go, you know, this is a good opportunity for me to just quit drinking coffee.
Merlin: I've already quit drinking coffee.
Merlin: I would just be continuing not drinking coffee.
John: That's right.
John: It was visited upon you.
John: That's how you quit smoking.
John: You get sick and you're like, I can't smoke.
John: And you get really sick.
John: You can't smoke for seven days.
John: And then you're you're through the worst of it.
John: Mm hmm.
John: But so I was without it.
John: And then we were going to Washington, D.C.
John: And my daughter's mother said, you can't go to Washington, D.C.
John: and not have a phone.
John: And I was like, yeah, OK.
John: And then she opens a drawer and says, I have an old iPhone 6.
John: Here you go.
John: That's still a pretty good phone.
John: It's a nice phone.
John: So what I did was I switched SIM cards.
John: Right.
John: Without doing anything else.
John: So all of a sudden I had like her old phone full of her old address book and stuff.
John: But all it did was, but you could call me.
John: It was a phone call receiving device.
John: Right.
John: And inexplicably, it had, every once in a while, one of my texts would come through.
John: About 20% of people sending me texts came through.
John: And it allowed me to go on the internet.
John: Those were the three things it could do.
John: Okay.
John: And from the Internet, I could go to Gmail and look at my mail, but I sort of was like, yeah, whatever, you know.
John: And so I went around.
John: So for two weeks, I had no smartphone.
John: I didn't I haven't posted really to anything.
John: And so here's what happened.
John: And I was like, I'm going to get a flip phone.
John: I'm done with smartphones.
John: I'm going to be like granddad with one of those flip phones that has really big buttons.
John: Oh, nice.
John: And then I will text my friends with no punctuation.
John: You're going all in.
John: You're going all in.
John: It's going to be old school.
John: Old school.
John: But what happened was at the end of the day, I would go sit at my laptop and conduct whatever small amount of business came in through email.
John: And I swear to you, Merlin,
John: the thing that part of me, that hole in my life that used to be fulfilled by the cell phone, I immediately went back on 4chan.
John: And I hadn't been on 4chan in five years.
John: At least you could go back on eBay.
Merlin: Right to 4chan.
John: 4chan has changed a lot since I was there five years ago.
Merlin: Has it gotten more toxic, John?
John: Well, all of the old...
John: People that were like, let's go dock somebody or let's raid this website devoted to cheerleaders or let's just, you know, anonymous.
John: All those guys are gone as far as I can tell.
John: And all that's on there now is like.
John: Post naked, you know, do you have any naked pictures of your girlfriend?
John: Post them.
John: Or there's a new thing that never existed before, which is rate my dick.
John: Rate my dick.
John: Right.
John: Where people just take a picture of their dick.
Merlin: They take a photograph of their penis and they put it on the website and then people offer like encouraging remarks.
John: Yeah, like, oh, you've got a nice dick or, oh, you've got a big dick.
John: And then there, because it's anonymous, right, then there's like, oh, I have a small dick.
John: Yes.
John: Yes, you do have a small dick.
John: Yes.
John: And there's probably 14 of those threads every day.
John: And that was, you never saw somebody like rate my dick back in 2000.
John: 2010 there's no nobody does anything anytime and nobody like does anything in the outside world every once in a while somebody will be like this guy's a jerk let's send a bunch of pizzas to his house and the only replies will be not your personal army nobody wants to do anything oh so they've lost the fire and then all the what used to be gore threads are now called wrecked threads
John: And I know enough from my own personal experience looking at gore threads that I do not want anything to do with them.
John: I do not click on them or look at them at all because I don't want to see people die.
John: No.
John: And what else is different about 4chan?
John: It's just mostly porn now.
John: It's like furry porn.
John: That's disappointing.
John: That's very disappointing.
John: The bottom went out.
Yeah.
John: So I went back to 4chan, and it's like, what is wrong with me?
John: Does anybody remember LOLs?
John: Yeah, what about LOLs?
John: What is wrong with me that I can't, that there's something where not having my social media stuff right at hand, I went to this, like... You sought a surrogate without even realizing it.
John: Yeah, this weird bunghole of the internet.
John: And every once in a while, somebody will start a thread who are like, I used to come on this site and I was gone for a long time.
John: And now I came back and you guys suck.
John: Speaking the truth to power.
John: But the thing is, this is another thing.
John: Somebody will put a thread up that's like, all right, everybody check in.
John: Like, who's out there?
John: And it's astonishing.
John: There are probably 50% of the people are 24 years old.
John: But then there are all these people that are like, I'm 55 years old and I work for the FBI.
John: Or I'm 49 and independently wealthy and...
John: And like people from all walks of life are still on there, still creeping on this.
John: What do you say when you check in?
John: I do not.
John: I have never.
John: You're part of the silent majority.
John: I am.
John: I am.
John: I'm the lurker.
John: I never post on there.
John: You're not even anonymous.
John: You're sub anonymous.
John: I'm sub anonymous.
John: I don't want to go on there and be like, hey, everybody, here's my thoughts on stuff.
John: Like, no, thank you.
John: You ever been tempted to put your dick up?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: You're confident in what you've got?
Merlin: You feel like you don't need the input, the feedback?
Merlin: I don't need anybody rating, Mike.
John: You don't need anybody.
John: I mean, here's the wonderful thing.
Merlin: If somebody wants to offer up a compliment unprovoked, that can be a very nice thing.
Merlin: It's very nice, right?
Merlin: It's an unexpected compliment, especially.
John: Well, that was nice of you to say.
John: Thank you for saying that.
John: My experience of women generally in the world is that they learned at a young age to be very careful when talking to men about other men or making comparisons between them and other men.
John: Because men are fragile, let's be honest.
John: Fragile like a crystal goblet.
Merlin: We want to believe this is not only the greatest dick they've ever seen, but probably the only dick.
John: Yeah.
John: And, you know, and yeah, exactly.
John: You want to think like, oh, this new girl that I'm dating has been with other people.
John: Surely I'm not some guy that's like weird, but please not that many people.
John: And please not don't have a lot of things to say about me, my technique and my body, except just like, oh, you're the best, honey.
Merlin: You should start doing that on 4chan.
John: Somehow.
Merlin: You should just start offering up, oh, you're the best, honey.
John: Like every woman in the country or in the world, just either they learn this at a young age from their women folk or they just intuitively know it.
John: But so infrequently, well, you meet somebody who's like, you know, compared to my last boyfriend, you are X. Yeah.
John: Because I think it just men are too delicate about it.
Merlin: It's...
Merlin: Obviously, most men are going to feel very fragile about a comparison that they didn't win.
Merlin: But even the fact that there's a comparison, I think, is kind of mind-blowing to a lot of people.
Merlin: How is there even a race here?
John: I've obviously got to be the best at this.
John: And I think men are very competitive with each other.
John: And if you set up a competition between you, a guy, the new boyfriend...
John: And an invisible ex that they cannot know so that they cannot directly compete with them.
John: It's just there.
John: They are in the fog.
John: Then that competition that, you know, the competitive spirit has nowhere to go except turn internally and be like, I bet that last boyfriend was better somehow.
John: And it's just all the insecurities like I did early on.
John: I had a girlfriend that was like my last boyfriend one time rode his motorcycle up the stairs of my house.
John: to come into my room in his leather pants and ravage me.
John: And I was like, oh, great.
John: Well, I'm not going to do any of those things.
John: So I hope that you're content with me coming by sometimes.
Merlin: Was that a serving suggestion, John?
John: Was she saying that's the thing she might like again?
John: She was saying it to me in the sense of what she wanted to establish was that I was the lucky one.
John: I was lucky to be with her.
John: She was not lucky to be with me.
John: A little bit of a power move.
John: Yeah, and it was clear to us both that she was not lucky to be with me because I did not ride a motorcycle up her stairs.
John: I never wore leather pants.
John: I was not even a heroin addict, even though I could have been.
John: Were you a ravager when I called for it?
John: I was not really a ravager, nor was I a rapper.
John: Usually what happened was I would show up at her house.
John: I would go through the cupboards and see if there was anything to eat.
John: And then, you know, I would take a bath.
John: And then when I got out of the bath, I would like mildly ravage her.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Politely.
John: You know, like a wet ravage.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then...
John: uh then i'd lay around for a while go look for some more food i'd lay around get a little bit more food maybe this time i would bring her a little little bit cup of chili get a glass of water you're like a friendly bear and then as the sun went down i'd be like well time i'm i'm headed to the bar uh i'd invite you to join me but you wouldn't have any fun
John: And that was about the extent of it.
John: And I think over the course of our relationship, what happened was my, this happened multiple times, my complete lack of ability to even pretend to try.
John: uh flipped the power dynamics so that eventually it did seem like i was the prize can you imagine that poor bastard that came next oh well she'd be like hey listen you know last guy i was with he would he would go through my cabinets well and also the guy it was retroactive the guy with the leather pants who rode his motorcycle up the stairs like where is he now like basically she's with me now buddy so uh-huh
John: How are you feeling?
John: Want to ride your motorcycle?
John: Down the stairs and back out onto the street where a motorcycle belongs.
Merlin: He's not going to be welcome at our restaurant.
John: But I don't do that anymore.
John: Now I'm very, very interested.
John: Are you attentive?
John: I'm very attentive.
John: I hardly ever go through someone's cupboard.
Merlin: Do you clean up after yourself?
John: Okay.