Ep. 302: "The Battle of Turns Outs"
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Good.
John: Why do you sound different?
John: I don't know.
John: You sound more compact.
John: You sound warm, but punchy.
Merlin: Warm, but I'm definitely punchy.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Maybe I finally broke in my microphone.
John: Oh, that's it.
John: That's probably it.
John: You broke it in.
John: How long has it been?
John: Oh, I don't know.
Merlin: Three weeks?
Merlin: Four weeks?
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: It's like headphones.
Merlin: You got to break them in.
Merlin: That's how long it takes to break in a mic.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Is that how long it takes?
Merlin: It's like a baseball glove.
Merlin: You put a ball in it and sleep on it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Have you been waxing your mic?
Merlin: Wax on, wax off.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Good.
John: Good.
Merlin: How are you doing today?
Merlin: You having a cramp?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I started off the day with a little bit of a tummy cramp.
Merlin: Well, you know you can leave whenever you need to.
Merlin: Oh, thanks.
Merlin: I mean, I know you know that, but let me put that differently.
Merlin: We could do whatever you need here.
John: Thanks.
John: Well, you know, what's in the show is in the show.
John: That's true.
Merlin: A lot of people probably doubt that.
Merlin: Do you think people doubt that?
Merlin: For example, did you just hear the streetcar go by?
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: Streetcar's back.
Merlin: Oh, it was not running for a while?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: June to Saturday, they were doing tunnel work on the West Portal Tunnel.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: So we've had bus service for two months.
Merlin: That's so much worse.
Merlin: It's so much worse.
Merlin: I have not... You know me, right?
Merlin: You know I'm a real muni head.
Merlin: I'm always with the muni.
Merlin: It's one of the myriad reasons I never want to move is we're very close to a muni line.
Merlin: And I work near a muni line.
Merlin: Don't be creepy.
Merlin: But I haven't stepped foot on a bus.
Merlin: My daughter refuses to get on the bus.
Merlin: She's a real snob.
John: When I ran for office, one of my platforms, and perhaps I emphasized it too much, but one of my platforms was...
John: You know, public transit and novel transit.
John: And I wanted to reestablish streetcars where there had formerly been streetcars.
John: Not anything crazy, just put the streetcars back where they'd been.
Merlin: You can't get the funiculars until people get comfortable with the more conventional means of transit.
John: But within the hyper-transit-focused...
John: and city services focused seattle uh liberal community there was tremendous derision from some quarters about street cars because it was it was stipulated over and over that buses could do the same job better and cheaper and in researching it you know what you discover is that the wear and tear on street cars is much less than the wear and tear
John: both on buses and that buses do to roads and towns.
John: Also, you can put, you know, you can put like five buses worth of people in a streetcar driven by one person.
Merlin: I bet this is one of those deeply turns out, you know, the kind of thing like, oh, should we get rid of straws?
Merlin: Well, yeah, we should get rid of straws, except that, don't at me, but except there's a big turns out to straws.
Merlin: I'm not going to get into it, but this is, I have a feeling that's definitely a turns out.
John: What is the turns out?
Merlin: I mean, I haven't done my own huge amount of due diligence on this, and I'm going to cut this out of the show.
Merlin: I won't cut this out of the show.
John: No, no, no.
John: Let's cut it out.
Merlin: I think we will remember the hubbub over straws as a turning point in the discussion about what individual consumers can do to help the environment.
Merlin: Because here's the thing.
Merlin: There's a lot, it turns out.
John: You don't use paper towels, do you?
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Me?
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Kill a freaking whale every day, why don't you?
Merlin: No, I don't even use cloth.
Merlin: I go and I bag old boxes from people and I cut them into small strips and I absorb with those.
Merlin: Well, you know, you're just encouraging big box.
Merlin: Where's the kid hiding behind my dongle?
Merlin: Just quickly, we should return to this because this is an interesting topic.
Merlin: But, you know, the story goes that there was that viral video that went around of the very sad turtle with a straw in its nose.
John: Oh, the sad turtle with the straw on its nose.
John: I did not actually, I didn't actually see it.
John: Yeah.
John: That's the Decembrist version.
John: I didn't actually see it.
John: Um, and I've never even heard of it, but just your description of it, sad turtle.
John: I'm, I'm putting it in straw.
Merlin: I'm not awake enough yet to totally mount this issue, but it's my understanding that you mean you're not awake enough or not.
Merlin: Can I be, can I be deadly honest with you?
Merlin: It's kind of early.
Merlin: It's not super early, but I just did an ad read for this show that you're going to hear in a few minutes, and I sound so stupid because I'm just really not awake yet.
Merlin: I've been up since 630, but I'm still not awake.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Why give of myself unto you?
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I'm not sending invoices and checking my email and shit.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: You get these two right here.
Merlin: I'm pointing at you with the two fingers.
Merlin: You get these two.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Full on.
Merlin: These ears, these cans, you get it all.
Merlin: That new freshly waxed mic.
Merlin: My new freshly... My stomach cramps.
Merlin: This is too much to go into.
Merlin: But you know the thing with recycling?
Merlin: Oh, I do.
Merlin: Okay, we don't talk about this because we're progressives.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But there's a lot about recycling that's a little bit of a jam up.
John: Sometimes it uses more energy than it saves.
Merlin: It's really a whole Penn & Teller type situation.
Merlin: There's a lot going on with recycling where like, yeah, when the markets for all that stuff are really good, there are businesses that are very happy to take your recycling.
Merlin: But there's other times...
Merlin: That we good progressives put things in the bluebastic and then that just goes to a different dump with more car rides.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And we haven't interrogated that because it's one of those things where it feels like we're helping.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So like we have a very large in San Francisco, you're given a very large recycling bin and a comically small trash bin.
Merlin: And we fill our neighbors don't recycle hardly at all.
Merlin: God bless them.
Merlin: We fill both.
Merlin: We fill 64 gallons of recycling every week.
Merlin: That's not even including the boxes.
Merlin: So we recycle a lot, but I mainly do it because like, I assume it's better than trash.
Merlin: But anyway, so I think we should talk about that at some point.
Merlin: Cause you know, if you ever decide to run again, this is the kind of thing that could really, you could start really laying down your bona fides on this stuff.
Merlin: Well, before I move on, do you have a thought on this?
Merlin: Well, they're recycling jam up.
John: I feel like I feel like we we are.
John: It's very easy for us to see how our political opponents are lying.
John: You know, like you look at it and you go lie.
John: That's a lie.
John: They're lying.
John: And they're big.
John: They're big lying.
John: Not just small lying.
John: They're big lying.
John: And they're all lying.
John: They're all lying together as one.
John: They're lying about big, big things.
John: And we can see it.
John: And we and we can't believe.
John: that the rank and file of our political opponents fall for the lies.
John: But what we don't see is that on our side of the political componentry, there's this thing that's very common, I think, on the left, which is
John: Look, we cannot afford to give a nuanced answer because it will confuse people.
John: Oh, 100%.
John: We cannot afford to show the unvarnished truth because our enemies will take what we show them and use it against us.
Merlin: Well, and if we talk too much about voter fraud, we might end up suppressing turnout ourselves.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: There's all kinds of stuff where, like, if we really go straight to the hard truth of this, like, it may not have the consequences we expect.
Right.
John: It's very complicated to be a leftist.
John: So what you do is you, if you're, if you are talking about homelessness and I'm not talking about promoting it, if you're just talking about being anti-homelessness, you found that you find the one person who is a hardworking person who lives in his car with his three kids and
John: And his, you know, his wife just died and he goes to church.
John: And, you know, you talk about him.
Merlin: You do not just talk about the mom who lives with their kid in a car while she still goes to work.
Merlin: She showers in a, you know, gas station bathroom.
John: You don't just go down to a homeless camp and pick the first person you run into.
John: You know, you find someone who's photogenic and who.
John: And so over time.
John: If you do say, well, you know, there are a lot of people down in the homeless camp that are like on drugs and committing violence, even the, your leftist friends will say, we can't afford to do that.
John: Like, don't talk about that.
John: Like that just gives aid and comfort to our enemies.
John: But over, over time, what you get is a kind of,
John: um you do not get the unvarnished truth and you're not able to talk about reality after a while because you because we're telling stories and we do it with recycling we do it with everything right but we don't recognize that we're also lying like lying to ourselves lying to others but because because we're doing it with good intentions we're doing it in order to
John: not, you know, not encourage our enemies to take our words out of context.
John: And it's like after a while,
John: You know, like you create a situation where like you, I mean, where your enemies are like, they're clearly lying because there's, and we don't, and the thing is we're so far into it.
John: We're so deep in it that, that, that offends us.
John: Like we're not lying.
John: We're telling a better truth.
John: We're telling the more truthy truth than just the, your regular dirty truth.
Merlin: it's very difficult and this is you know this is true in the issue that you're talking about it's like no no that one turtle in the world ever got a straw up its nose but that's the story not because and again it's it's one of those things also where uh really i am anti-straw and pro-turtle by the way literally begging people not to contact me about this i will ban you from listening to the show if you contact me about this i don't want to discuss this i don't want an article i don't want a fact
Merlin: I just want to talk to my friend John.
Merlin: If you want to listen in, that's fine.
Merlin: But if you contact me at all about anything we talk about on this episode, I will ban you from listening to the show.
Merlin: I will find your IP address.
Merlin: I will get behind your seven proxies and you will be banned from listening to the show.
Merlin: You can write me and I'll forward it to Matt Howey.
Merlin: Because it's such a... Here, it's a very simple thing.
Merlin: We got three cans.
Merlin: We got compost.
Merlin: And I do believe the compost helps.
Merlin: When I roll that thing out to the curb and it's 40, 80, 100 pounds of compost, it does make a difference.
Merlin: And it opens up space in the other cans.
Merlin: There's a cascade.
Merlin: I do believe that must help.
Merlin: It does.
Merlin: But there are these kinds of things where...
Merlin: Oh, I'm not going to say virtue signaling.
Merlin: But there are things that we do that are not surpassingly difficult to do, whether that's your role in the posting culture or whether that's whether you put your toilet paper tube into the recycling, where it's not difficult to do, whereas you get to feel good about yourself and you now get to look down on people who don't do it.
Merlin: But I think we should talk about this again in the future when I'm more awake.
Merlin: But the straw thing, I think, I'm going to go pop up the stack here.
Merlin: We've got the recycling.
Merlin: We've got the straws.
Merlin: What it comes down to is we're going to have to change so much shit at a much higher level.
John: Are you saying that the whole straw issue is a straw man?
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Merlin: You just rattle your spurs at me.
Merlin: I want you to be awake.
Merlin: I want you to be fully awake.
Merlin: I want to be fully awake because that's a very important conversation.
Merlin: And I just want to really remind people I will ban you.
Merlin: But this gets us back to the public transit issue and the turns outs.
Merlin: I think that's where we started was the – it is sometimes – and the reason I saw that pivot in my very tired brain is that there are – when you dig beyond the surface issues of the one axis of something that you understand, there's almost always something way more complicated under the surface.
Merlin: That's not as obvious.
Merlin: And that's where you get into the double, the triple, the quadruple turns out.
Merlin: And you get to these layers of like, yeah, but this, yeah, but that.
Merlin: And then you go deeper into the systemic level and you see all these huge differences.
Merlin: It might just be that people in Seattle don't want noisy streetcars riding around.
Merlin: Or maybe they think they're uglier for poor people and can't say it.
John: When you go into politics, you know there are a lot of smart people there.
John: And they're all practicing a version of you've got to lie in order to tell the truth.
John: Like you cannot tell the truth to people because that will get you not elected.
Merlin: You certainly need to at least avoid the most extreme part of the truth that while being truthy undermines what it is you're trying to accomplish.
John: No, not even that.
John: You need to bold-faced lie every minute of every day.
John: Well, because the number one lie is...
John: i'm going to address your direct concern when i get to office and every single person somehow who comes up to you and wants to talk passionately to you about their about their uh like tiny little like obsession yeah won't take any answer other than i really care about this issue too and as soon as i get to washington i'm gonna make this my personal mission and so you're not allowed to say that's stupid
John: Every politician says it to every single person all day long, and they don't even roll their eyes at it.
John: They're just like, this is, you know, as soon as I get to Washington, I'm really going to look into this.
John: And the really virtuous ones are like, well, you know, that's a very complicated issue.
John: And I've got people looking into it.
John: And as soon as we get to Washington, we're really going to take a hard look at that.
John: Like, that's the kind of answer that doesn't promise anything.
Merlin: Yeah, that already feels a little weaselly.
John: But the world of turns out, it becomes a battle of turns outs.
John: I mean, the streetcar one in particular, like turns out over the lifetime of a streetcar system, it's much less expensive than buses.
John: And then the other side will say, turns out ridership is
John: declines during rainstorms and then you're like well turns out new you know streetcar stops become urban hubs where people
John: where new buildings go in with coffee shops and like dog grooming services.
Merlin: And then the other side is like.
Merlin: Consolidate services in those areas.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: In a way that makes a lot of sense.
John: That people that won't happen around bus routes because people feel buses are.
Merlin: And you won't even see that it's possible if it's never happened before.
Merlin: I can tell you when they changed, they did lots of stuff with our street car line last year.
Merlin: And one of the things they did that pretty much everybody, well, they wanted to reduce the number of stops, which I think makes a lot of sense because right now it's almost every other street.
Merlin: It is too many.
Merlin: I mean, even accounting for folks with disabilities, I think that you definitely need more disability accessible ramps and stuff like that.
Merlin: But every other, if you account for traffic and everything, every other street in our far-flung neighborhood is a little bit crazy.
Merlin: But the nuttiest one they took out that even that I thought was silly was they took out the one right next to Safeway.
Merlin: And people flipped because they're like, wait a minute, like of all the ones you could take out, like that's crazy.
Merlin: Like I actually use that.
Merlin: We all actually use that.
Merlin: And they put it back in because I guess it made sense in the plan.
Merlin: But in terms of people's actually actually like lived experiences, you know, that would that was nuts.
John: They weren't doing the thing where they were like grocery store.
John: And this is we talked about this on the campaign trail all the time, like gross.
John: Who who gets in their car?
John: They get in their car to go to the grocery store and the doctor and.
John: And to work, right?
John: So you put the grocery store and the doctor in their neighborhood because you build little communities again instead of consolidating everything in giant office parks.
John: And then you distribute people's work environments the same way.
John: If you can.
John: But on the other hand, you know, and so the battle of turns out, it's like I had a fellow city council candidate come to me toward the end of the campaign right before the right before the.
John: primary election, which I lost.
John: He was a younger guy.
John: He was a city council candidate who had an earring.
John: He was, you know, like pretty dynamic, very, very political guy.
John: He'd been in politics since he was a young Democrat in high school or something.
John: So he really...
John: Everybody knew him and he felt like he, uh, was really kind of in the, in the game.
John: And he, and he was, you know, he was a, he was a fun person to interact with along the road.
John: And I, he, he gave, he gave the impression and still does of someone who's going to have a lifetime in politics, whether he's elected to office or not.
John: But he, we were sitting and talking and he was like, you know, when you join this race and no one had really heard of you in politics, uh,
John: your whole thing about the street cars was just dumb.
John: And I was like, it wasn't dumb.
John: And he was like, it was just dumb.
John: That's not, nobody's going to vote for you because of that.
John: And I was like, well, it doesn't matter whether they vote for me because of it.
John: It needs to happen.
John: And he and about three other city council candidates were all like, Oh boy.
John: Like they really did roll their eyes right at me, right in my face.
John: And I was like, well, seriously, though.
Merlin: Because you're being impractical or talking about something that's not really an issue?
John: Well, no, because I ever said it doesn't matter whether people vote for me about it or not.
John: Oh, I see, I see.
John: But I was talking about something that was not the issues.
John: It fell far outside the circle of issues of the moment.
John: And what I realized is, like,
John: they're fashionable issues.
John: And when you're running for office, you need to really, really address the fashionable issues.
John: And you don't, the thing is, it's not that you, that you shouldn't go off into the woods, uh, talking about something that they feel like is resolved.
John: Um, what it's that you don't have to write.
John: They were all grateful that they didn't have to talk about, about transit because nobody, because that was like fourth down on the list.
John: And I'm out there like, Oh, you know what would help?
John: And, and that was not, that was dumb because what I should have been talking about was how big developers were ruining the lives of, of innocent mothers.
John: And, you know, there were a lot of hot takes on that and I kind of didn't feel like I needed to add one.
John: And that was, you know, that made me seem like I wasn't up on the issue.
John: You'll know more for next time.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: That's right.
John: When I run for Sheriff of Twisp, the first thing I'm going to do is walk in there and say, what do you guys care about?
John: They're like, ding!
Merlin: I get the feeling you haven't watched a lot of Parks and Recreation, which is fine.
Merlin: I sent you a video that's a compilation of one of the great running gags on the show, which is Amy Poehler's character, Leslie Knope.
Merlin: She loves having these town halls where people can come and ask questions.
Merlin: Anytime anything comes up, she wants to have a town hall.
Merlin: Of course, Ron Swanson, the Nick Offerman character, hates this because he doesn't want to know what the people think.
Merlin: It's a compilation called Citizens of Pawnee that features some of the best moments.
Merlin: And watching this really makes me think about what she went through.
Merlin: I'm looking at one of my favorites here.
Merlin: A woman gets up and says, I found a sandwich in one of your parks, and I want to know why it didn't have mayonnaise.
Merlin: This is the same woman who deliberately took non-potable water and made sun tea and wants to know why she got sick.
Merlin: I mean, you just can't say to people, well, you're mental.
Merlin: You can't just say that.
Merlin: You can't say, well, let's focus on the real stuff here instead of your bizarre five-year-old grievances.
John: No, you can't.
John: But what's weird is, and I think we've talked about this before, what's weird is that those people, because they make...
John: a life out of focusing on local politics which you know it's this weird self-selection you would have to be kind of crazy to make local politics your form of not just civic engagement but entertainment right like what are we going to do tonight we could go to the movies or we could go down to uh like a high school where a bunch of candidates
John: are answering questions.
John: Like, who wants to do that?
John: Well, some people do.
John: I bet there are people who show up for every one of those things.
John: Oh, for sure they do.
John: They show up for every one of them and they wear their signature hat that has buttons on it.
John: And so you want to think... I guess we're going to hear from Lou tonight.
John: Yeah, well, and you hear every night.
John: You hear from them every night.
John: And as a candidate, when you first arrive on the scene, you're like, well, I mean, these people are the kooks.
John: But the real voters is who we're trying to get to.
John: And what you learn over time is, no, these kooks actually have a crude power because they get themselves elected to the job of district leaders.
John: you know, like unelected, but yeah, elected, I guess within their group of 25 people who do a straw poll and which one of them is going to be the, you know, the legislative district 43 campaign organizer.
John: And then that person decides like where the thing is, who's going to be there, you know, like over, over the course of this, like,
John: from a very small group it becomes the democratic party right it grows and grows and grows whoever shows up for those meetings is going to have an outsized influence yeah they're the party right and they decide where the money goes and they decide
John: And, you know, as they get more sophisticated, they realize that their little thing about like, why are all my electrical outlets in my house upside down?
John: That's like, oh, that's not really a city thing.
John: What do you mean it's not a city thing?
John: Stop avoiding the question.
John: As they get as they've been in it longer and longer, they know that they at least have to suppress that.
Merlin: I could see that being stuff that everybody could even agree on, or most people.
Merlin: Think about the dog poop issue, and I face this in the neighborhood.
Merlin: Dog poop is an issue everywhere.
Merlin: It's an issue very much in our neighborhood.
Merlin: On the one hand, there are very, very – I see this on Nextdoor.
Merlin: You see it everywhere.
Merlin: There are very loud voices saying, look –
Merlin: it starts out as, hey, you know, everybody who has a dog, please pick up after your dog.
Merlin: Everybody says, thank you.
Merlin: And they come in and give claps and they agree.
Merlin: There's nobody from, you're not hearing from the side that says, I just let my dog shit wherever I want and y'all are funny.
Merlin: You're not going to hear from them.
Merlin: There is no lobby for, I'm just going to let my dog shit wherever they want.
Merlin: So naturally, you're going to hear a lot.
Merlin: Now, is that the issue that we need to focus on to the exclusion of other issues?
Merlin: Well, if it turns out the five people come to every meeting and talk about it, I guess that's how it works, right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Then it becomes an issue, yeah?
John: Well, it becomes an issue, but also other people bring other issues, and
John: And pretty soon you're in a like I've told you I told you about when I went to the political meetings that were up in the northeast part of Seattle and many, many people came over and said that the biggest issue for them was that the city of Seattle promised them sidewalks.
John: They didn't have sidewalks in their neighborhood.
John: when their city was annexed to Seattle, I'm talking about Lake City, Washington, when it was annexed to Seattle in 1952, part of the annexation agreement
John: was that they would lose their autonomy, become part of Seattle, but in return, they would get city services and sidewalks would get put in.
Merlin: This is a Korean War era agreement that still has not been fulfilled.
Merlin: Right.
John: Oh, you know they're good and mad about that.
John: There are some sidewalks up there, but it's a very difficult neighborhood to sidewalk, basically.
John: There are a lot of steep hills.
John: And there are a lot of people who feel a lot of resentment.
John: Because over time, every time they look out their window and they see somebody struggling up the hill with a grocery bag, they put that down in their spiral bound notebook of people inconvenienced by lack of sidewalk.
John: And every time a kid falls down and every time a dog gets hit by a car, it's further...
John: That's another crime that the city of Seattle has created by virtue of not fulfilling their promise to put these sidewalks in.
Merlin: It's an incident that would not have happened if they had just made good on their 60-year-old deal.
John: Right.
John: If there were sidewalks in Lake City, there would be no dogs ever killed by cars.
John: And although that's not true, there has not been a dog killed by a car.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: There hasn't been a dog killed by a car that wasn't a result of a lack of sidewalks.
John: And so when you talk to people there, it's...
John: They're not crazy.
John: They understand it's a relatively small thing.
John: But what they want you to understand is the trail of tears, the fucking carnage that has resulted.
John: And what a simple ask it is.
John: It's not even an ask.
John: They were promised.
John: And so you look at them and you go, hey, I'm just the latest guy to run for city council.
John: And I'll tell you about what little I know about the budget is that there is not
John: 250 million dollars to put sidewalks in lake city there's not even a million dollars to do to fund a study about how there's no chance of getting a sidewalk so but i mean you can't there's no there's no answer you can give to that that's not going to be at least very disappointing if not offensive to them and and the dog poop thing is like
John: The solution is to have a cop on every street corner with a fire hose, an active fire hose, and give him discretion to hit anybody he wants with it.
John: But then tell him only to hit dogs that are pooping on the sidewalk.
John: I mean, I don't know another solution other than to, like,
John: I mean, because the people who are doing it, like when I talk to the guys across the street about the barking dogs, I got the age old, I mean, right away, the first words out of their mouths were like, well, that's what dogs do.
John: That's just what dogs do.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They bark all night.
Merlin: You're coming at it from very different points of view.
John: And the dog poop people are like, that's what dogs do.
John: They poop.
John: I mean, everybody poops.
John: It's right there in the book.
John: It's in the book.
John: And the next leap, whatever that leap is, every town hall in the world can't hold someone's hand and walk them through whatever the logical steps are to get to the next...
John: the next place, which is like, well, what if every dog pooped on the sidewalk?
John: We'd just, it'd be Paris.
John: We'd be walking through needy poop.
John: Paris.
John: And, and then that person's going to be like, nah, nah, man.
John: And you're like, well, I mean, I don't, what if I pooped on the sidewalk?
John: Oh, don't do that.
John: I mean, you just can't, there's no, you can't walk them anywhere.
John: They're just, they are where they are.
Merlin: I mean, if you could speak to them, if you could speak to them honestly or practically, like, what would you tell them?
John: Well, you can.
John: You can speak to them, honestly.
Merlin: Do you just say it's not going to happen?
Merlin: Right now, it can't happen.
John: Who am I talking to now?
John: The people who are mad about the poop or the people who are letting their dogs poop?
Merlin: Well, I mean, I don't know.
Merlin: I guess it just seems like they're...
Merlin: There's a lot to be said for Bill Clinton-ing your way through things and making everybody feel like the most special person in the world and having them feel heard.
Merlin: But in terms of real life, you kind of want to be able to take them aside and say, look, I hate to tell you, but right now, there's less than no plan for this.
Merlin: There's the opposite of a plan for this, and we don't really have any way to change it.
John: Like 99% of the problem of civilization is that half of the people think that the architecture of civilization is oppressive.
John: There are too many rules.
John: The jackbooted feds are waiting to take your land and take your guns and take your cigarettes.
John: And what they don't see is all the daily shit that government does for them.
John: They take it for granted.
John: They think that the water just comes out of the pipe because it's because of God.
Merlin: And it's mostly not deadly.
John: Mostly not deadly.
John: Oh, there's that great streetcar.
John: It's so beautiful.
John: I missed it so much.
John: But they also think like... I chose poorly.
John: Like when they go down and file a claim, you know, their property lines, they are very into those lines.
John: They don't want to have to they don't think about the fact that like they don't have to be out there defending their property line against their neighbor every day.
John: Mm hmm.
John: Because the government enforces that property line, and if they had a problem, if somebody was like, I'm building a shed over onto your property, they would go immediately to whatever government agency it is that... And there's an apparatus in place for dealing with that at something like scale.
John: Absolutely.
John: But the people that are against the government and zoning and property rights in general, they just don't reflect enough to see that...
John: They're benefiting from that system.
John: They're benefiting from every single system.
John: And they just don't add their benefit into their calculation of how much it costs them to be ruled over by this government.
John: But the other side, the other problem is all the people that think that government is magic.
John: and that oh sure sure sure if you if the government why don't you just wait why don't you just wave the magic wand i know you've got it right just just do something and it's like and what they don't understand is the problem of enforcement you can make as many laws as you want but if you if the people don't you know that like the property line thing there's no army of
John: Um, of zoning cops who walk around every day, like with a baton walking around, you know, brushing people's kids back over their property line into their yard and saying like, we're enforcing this, you know, because the community itself enforces its own understanding, right?
John: That's why we build fences.
John: That's why we, um,
John: But, but so many things, and this is a big thing with like real estate development.
John: People say, well, why don't they protect the beautiful old Victorian houses from getting torn down?
John: And it's like, well, because you have to, like you were saying before, you have to go so far upstream.
John: Like, do you prohibit people from buying property unless they can prove they're going to do something that you approve of with that property?
John: Right.
John: Do you zone every Victorian?
John: Do you have, do you hire like a team of 600 people?
Merlin: Cause that's going to bring out the other side.
Merlin: That's going to bring out the, the Ayn Randian like get out of my yard people.
John: Oh, well not just that.
John: Who, who decides?
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: You would have to, you would have to hire what, how many, how many college students would it take to walk around and catalog every single beautiful home in San Francisco?
John: Right.
John: But then they can't just be college students.
John: They have to know the difference between a shitty home that's been painted pink and a beautiful home that's fallen into disrepair and looks like shit.
John: And then they would have to be able to tell...
John: They would have to be making pretty sophisticated calls about every single house on the block.
John: And you know – you look across the street at that house every day.
John: You know what it is.
John: But somebody coming along with a clipboard that's just doing a survey –
John: They're like, oh, yeah, the house is kind of dirty and it's covered with siding.
Merlin: In San Francisco, that's the last thing you want is somebody saying your house is historic.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That changes everything.
Merlin: Suddenly, it gets way harder to do practically anything with it.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's been used by people against people as a punitive thing.
Merlin: It's one way to basically screw with your political enemies is to have their private property declared important.
Merlin: I think it's genius.
Merlin: It's incredible.
Merlin: There's a dust up in our neighborhood that happened a while back where there's this long standing feud between this guy and this woman in some level of government.
Merlin: And yeah, she totally had it like in the middle of a remodel had his house declared important.
John: So good.
John: I mean, it's so diabolical.
John: She's the worst.
John: But, you know, there are a billion of those, and one of them is like, I mean, dog pooping on sidewalk is a thing that should be community enforced.
John: Like, we just know not to do that.
John: But then every once in a while, somebody gets away with it, and then somebody walks down the street.
John: I mean, one of the things the guys across the street from me said, about eight or nine years ago, there was a dog up the street that barked all day.
John: The people that owned him would put him out in the morning and they would go to work.
John: And the dino was a big poodle.
Merlin: So they don't hear it.
John: They don't know anything about it.
Merlin: They come home and they hear their dog greeting them.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: You follow me?
Merlin: You know, I had this little Linus when we lived downstairs all day long.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: I was like, oh, Linus is glad to see me.
Merlin: No, no, dude.
Merlin: Linus has been doing that since you left.
Merlin: Believe me, I know.
Merlin: It was six feet from my ears.
John: And this dog was the same.
John: It was a big poodle.
John: It had a big bark.
John: And it sat up there and barked all day.
John: All day.
John: And so I went over there one time with a letter...
John: and i walked up to the fence and here's this dog just barking like crazy and as i got closer you could see the dog's tail was wagging and it had a big friendly look on its face and so i tentatively kind of put my hand over the fence and the dog was just like oh my god thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for any kind of contact or anything to do or think about and so he's licking my hand wagging his tail just just like a like a like an excited seal and so i went inside the gate and i walked up i put the letter
John: because it's 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I put the letter in their mailbox, and the letter said, your dog barks all day, FYI.
John: And anybody who isn't, anybody who's in their house all day, it just echoes in the neighborhood.
John: And there's got to be something else you can do.
John: And then a couple of weeks went by, and the dog was still out there.
John: And so I wrote another letter, and I went over in the middle of the day, and I put it in their mailbox, or I put it in their mail slot, and it said,
John: You know, I asked you to think about this and the dog is still barking every day.
John: And I would just like to point out that it is not very neighborly because you may not hear it, but I work from home and it's exasperating.
John: I mean, it's really starting to drive me crazy.
John: And I guess the third time I wrote a letter to them,
John: where I was getting more exasperated.
John: And I think you can imagine what an exasperated letter from me sounds like their dog.
John: They solved the problem.
John: Now I don't know whether they lock the dog in the basement all day and the dog has become a, it's gone feral, like raving lunatic, but the dog doesn't bark all day anymore.
John: And you know, and I'm not like my sister who thinks on behalf of the dog, um,
John: When the dog stopped barking all day, my mind went back to a peaceful state of rest.
John: And however, whatever accommodations that family had to make in order that that not happen, I don't care.
John: That's their responsibility.
John: I mean, I have to resist the impulse to put on a sword every time I walk out the door.
John: And I do resist that impulse because of neighborliness.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Well, when the family across the street bought the two giant-necked pit bulls and chained them in a shipping container, or like an 8x8 shipping container across the street for them to bark all night, it, I swear to you, empowered the people with the poodle to start leaving their dog out.
John: So they're going to do it.
John: Yeah.
John: So all of a sudden I'm hearing barking from a couple of locations and it happened.
John: Now you're in a barking dog neighborhood.
John: That's right.
John: And it's, it wasn't a coincidence, right?
John: The poodle came back.
John: This is eight years later.
John: The poodle has, the poodle was probably three then.
John: And it's fucking 11 now.
John: Like the poodle has lived its life in somewhere else.
John: And now it's back.
John: And.
John: When I was talking to the family with the pit bulls, the second thing they said was, well, we're not the only ones.
John: There's that dog up at the corner like this.
John: And that was evidence of like, this is just what dogs do.
John: And it was impossible for me to say like, well, they, and I tried, I said like, well, that dog didn't used to be there, but now it's there.
Merlin: Apply that to a dozen other things.
Merlin: And it's like, in that case, it's because you have this real soft spot for your doggy, but like apply that to a million other things.
Merlin: Well, they throw their trash in the street.
John: Well, yeah, but that's the, if you would, would you jump off a bridge if they did argument, which like, I don't know, people don't hear, but, but it would, all of this relies on them.
John: having us having been raised differently basically but but the the problem of a problem of the way that um that liberals interact with government is that they do think it's magic uh they do think that government can solve all these problems and when i looked into what it would take to call the cops or the animal control on the people across the street i realized oh you know what like
John: Government isn't set up to do this.
John: They have a lot of stuff on their website about what their process is about filing this kind of complaint.
John: But as you read it, you realize they have to think about this from 20 different ways.
Merlin: This is a very next door problem.
Merlin: You've heard me.
John: Do you know what next door is?
John: You've told me about it.
John: And the only times I've ever heard next door referred to by you or anyone else, it's always like,
Merlin: uh i saw black that next door is very very problematic it's pretty it's pretty problematic but the reason i say here just to jump in real quick is that yeah that that's that's a big thing well right now the hot topics are a guy up in the 40s and 40 40s avenues uh who revs his motorcycle and everybody's mad about that understandably lots of lots of package theft
John: Oh, that is a big one now.
Merlin: Package theft.
Merlin: The classic one that's a running bid on Dubai Friday that still comes up all the time is that you take a photo of somebody in a green vest with a clipboard and say, this person says they're from Pacific Gas and Electric.
Merlin: I called PG&E and the famous quote, they said no one was supposed to be in the area.
Merlin: I have reported this to the police.
Merlin: But no, in that case, you're right.
Merlin: I mean, there is this prevailing feeling, at least amongst the people who post the posts and comment on the posts, there is this prevailing feeling that there is something that can and should be done about all of these things that's trivially easy for somebody to do if they would just do your job, sir.
Merlin: Do your job, sir.
Merlin: If you ran down every one of these leads...
Merlin: The leads.
Merlin: Yeah, we got two guys working on it around the clock.
Merlin: The leads.
Merlin: You think you'll find my briefcase?
Merlin: Follow the leads.
Merlin: The Glenn Gary leads.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But it's like Big Lebowski when his car gets stolen.
Merlin: He's like, you got any leads?
Merlin: He's got leads.
Merlin: Yeah, leads.
Merlin: We got two guys working on it around the clock.
Merlin: Seriously, though, it's like, oh, the package thief thing, that sucks.
Merlin: It sucks.
Merlin: I would hate that.
Merlin: I would hate that.
Merlin: But, like, there is— But wait, are there really package thieves?
Merlin: There are.
Merlin: Well, you know, yeah, I do believe there are, and I do believe it is a thing.
Merlin: And I do believe that San Francisco has gone off the fucking charts on car break-ins.
Merlin: This is all true.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Can I mention one thing also in passing, and I don't want to go too deep on this, but I feel like I just sent you a link to an article.
Merlin: Everybody's having a real good laugh at San Francisco, understandably right now.
Merlin: This is a headline from Business Insider from August 24th.
Merlin: People are being paid more than $70,000 a year to clean poop off the streets of San Francisco.
Merlin: It's reported that they're being underpaid.
Merlin: Well, and according to pay scale, the average salary is 85.
Merlin: And then with benefit, this could be a three for so hilarious San Francisco story.
Merlin: Can you even believe they've gotten to the point now where this dingaling city can't get people to stop pooping on the streets?
Merlin: So they have to hire people.
Merlin: Shit, my boss makes more makes makes that much money.
Merlin: I should move to San Francisco and clean up poop.
Merlin: And you get into so many goddamn turns out.
Merlin: Okay, smart guy, how do we fix that problem?
Merlin: Well, do you think people poop on the streets because they're super into pooping on the streets?
Merlin: They don't.
Merlin: They don't poop because they don't have a bathroom.
Merlin: Why don't they have a bathroom?
Merlin: Well, let's start splitting these hairs starting right here.
Merlin: Well, on the one hand, Starbucks is not in the business of being a public restroom and shower.
Merlin: Like, that's true.
Merlin: It's hard.
Merlin: There is not a sustainable amount of public restrooms for the people who need to poop.
Merlin: They go to the park, they do whatever.
Merlin: And then so what do you do?
Merlin: You keep pushing through.
Merlin: You go, okay, well, that's because they don't have a bathroom.
Merlin: They don't have a bathroom because they don't have a place to live.
Merlin: They don't have a place to live because they've been priced out of the market.
Merlin: But at any one of those points, especially on this one issue, it could branch off in two or three other directions.
Merlin: A lot of it does eventually end up back at income inequality.
Merlin: and an unaffordable town that's run by tech companies.
Merlin: But at any point along the way, the way that you choose to frame at any level of that problem, the way that you choose to frame the problem, talk about what the solutions are, you're...
Merlin: It's just pissing in the ocean, you know?
Merlin: So, yeah, it's terrible that we have to do that.
Merlin: And it's hilarious when your friends pass around the maps of San Francisco where the poop has been counted.
Merlin: It's really like a serious big problem here.
Merlin: But there is not a magic wand for that.
Merlin: Otherwise, it would already be done.
Merlin: If there was an easy way to, and I know there are ways to make that better.
Merlin: A lot of people say just, you know, turns out, one of the great turns outs is it has been learned that you spend less money on homelessness and homeless people by giving them a fucking free place to live.
Merlin: Nobody wants to do that.
Merlin: That's not in the budget.
Merlin: Again, but I just feel like when you get to any of this stuff, you assume all of this stupidity and bad faith and
Merlin: of everybody who doesn't see it the way that you do maybe i do that too i'm certain that i probably do that on probably lots of stuff but it's like you know who wants to be the one to show up at the meeting and go uh based on the budget we've got this is simply a problem that we cannot it's a problem we can't solve and it's a problem we can barely afford to even talk about
Merlin: And that sucks.
Merlin: And this is something where, like, we're going to need something much bigger than hiring a few people to pick up poop to solve the actual problem behind this problem.
Merlin: That's, it turns out, that's going to require something much deeper.
Merlin: It is deeply embarrassing that our city has still not figured out a way to address this problem.
John: But all the stuff they tried hasn't worked.
John: This is the government is magic problem.
Merlin: I think so.
John: Which is a lot of those issues are not necessarily even...
John: under anybody's original definition of what government did.
John: So you fight wars, you build highways.
John: Well, you don't even fight wars.
John: You just allow people to keep muskets in their closet.
John: A more strictly libertarian way of view.
John: Well, no.
John: What do you want a government to do?
John: First of all, what can a government do?
John: And then what do you want it to do?
John: And like, first of all, we all know anybody who is older than 28 knows that San Francisco always had poop on the streets a long time before tech was even a thing.
John: 1986, the mission below.
Merlin: I go to Southland Market before it became the Moscone Center and all of that.
Merlin: I mean, that was a pretty dangerous place to go 20 years ago.
John: Well, it was a dangerous place to go just from the standpoint of stepping in human poop until until now.
John: I mean, but it always was like that.
John: In 1986, when I first was there, I was like, oh, my God, it's like escape from New York just on the other side of the street.
Merlin: It has been the case.
Merlin: This is, I think, one consistency, and this is not a proud thing, but there's one nexus of activity where a lot happens, especially involving local people and tourists.
Merlin: So if you take something like, not Market and Fifth, but basically where the cable car turnaround is.
Merlin: So you're in between two stations.
Merlin: You're right next to Powell Street Station.
Merlin: Everybody's there.
Merlin: Yeah, you're a few blocks away from Civic Center Station.
Merlin: And there's people from all over the world who have come to San Francisco because it's such a great place.
Merlin: And they're at the cable car turnaround.
Merlin: There's also, like I say, Powell Street Station is right below there.
Merlin: You walk literally...
Merlin: One to three, really, basically, as soon as you start walking west of there, within a block, your mind's going to be blown.
Merlin: You go two blocks away.
Merlin: You start getting closer to Civic Center Station.
Merlin: And it is, like I say, it is like a Godspeed you, Black Emperor song.
Merlin: Like, it is fucked up.
Merlin: And there are people camping on the grass outside City Hall, and it's real dark.
Merlin: And that has been the case for a real long time.
Merlin: This is not a new thing.
John: Well, because San Francisco was one of the pioneer cities of what you think of as kind of libertarian liberalism
John: which is we're not going to pay for a bunch of cops to break people's heads.
John: We're not going to move panhandlers along because we're compassionate.
John: We're a compassionate city, and we're not going to be draconian in terms of enforcement of sort of like civic law, right?
John: Yeah.
John: In the mid-'90s, there was a city attorney here in Seattle that passed a law
John: Prohibiting sitting on the sidewalk.
John: Yeah, we had that.
John: And, you know, this was a this was a movement, a civic attempt to deal with what was seen as this epidemic of people sitting on the sidewalk.
John: Now, the people that were against it were like, you can't outlaw sitting.
John: Well, they're blocking the road and they're causing a public nuisance and it's a health issue.
John: Because they can't say what they're really trying to target with that.
John: Well, and what they're saying is, I mean, again, it's an enforcement thing.
John: What they're doing is empowering police officers to make...
John: like ad hoc decisions as they're walking down the street.
Merlin: Because the cops aren't just... They can kind of keep that in their pocket, like trespassing or like a standing violation, no standing area.
Merlin: It's something you can keep in your pocket if you need to make somebody move along.
John: Yeah, if two people in pinstripe suits are sitting on the sidewalk counting $100 bills, the cops are not going to say, like, it's against the law.
John: And if you happen to be standing there with a cup...
John: that says, you know, please help.
John: They're not gonna... Or a joke that says XXX.
John: You know, they're not gonna tip their hat at you and say, good day, thank you for not sitting.
John: Like, they're gonna move you along with that law.
John: But San Francisco was a city that made a real point about being compassionate.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, there's a bit of conventional wisdom here that I don't know if this is historically true, but the conventional wisdom on this is that, yeah, like any metropolitan-ish city, there's always been a – there's just a problem with poverty and there's a problem with drug abuse.
Merlin: There's a problem with all kinds of things.
Merlin: But the conventional wisdom is that –
Merlin: when our former governor was president in the early 80s, the story is that a lot of people were basically pushed out of mental health facilities that used to be in the state of California.
Merlin: This might not even happen when he was governor, but supposedly the point is that the story goes that Reagan cleaned all, saved money, cleaned everybody out of these institutions where people were getting some kind of de minimis amount of care for mental health issues.
Merlin: So that happened.
Merlin: But then the other thing that happened is, okay, so where are you going to go?
Merlin: And the climate of the city, plus what you just described in terms of the attitude of the city, kind of made it a destination for people.
Merlin: Well, there are people that will come from other areas.
Merlin: I'm not saying this is good, bad or indifferent, but it's true to this day.
Merlin: Certainly people from the East Bay might come here.
Merlin: Maybe even people from L.A.
Merlin: might come here.
Merlin: But they come here because, you know, this is the place where you can kind of land and you're not going to get super hassled.
Merlin: But in the conventional wisdom, that's where people say it really became a problem.
Merlin: I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what people say.
John: Well, you know, it's one of those that's what people say things.
John: And I've actually had some interesting conversations.
John: Are you going to give me a turns out?
John: I've had some interesting conversations.
Merlin: Oh, bring it on.
John: The battle of turns outs.
John: It turns out.
John: Turns out.
John: The battle of turns outs was that... And I heard this, I think, from Roderick on the Line listener, was that the United States had been kind of...
John: More or less like, I guess what you would describe as emptying the asylums for decades, that that had been a project that began back in the early 60s, late 50s.
John: And during that whole period, you know, they were sort of D they were taking away that aspect of like involuntary incarceration.
John: Those big those big infirmaries, I guess, where people were what we called insane asylums.
John: The the the nurse ratchet style of.
John: And we've been we've been shutting those down and had not seen.
John: Through that whole period, any increase in homelessness or street crime or whatever, it was during the Reagan administration, yes, but it was the defunding of the housing and urban development department, right?
John: Reagan took all this money away from HUD, which was the organization that was
John: that was providing sort of rent assistance and public housing.
John: And, you know, it was the organizing organization that, and, and, and HUD was, was an invention of the 20th century as well.
John: But, you know, HUD had, HUD came in and took the place of,
John: what had probably been this incredible, uh, like constellation of Catholic human services and, you know, local, local this and local that HUD consolidated it.
John: And then Reagan, that we came to depend on it, then Reagan defunded it.
John: And so at that point, all of a sudden there were all these, uh, there, all these services went away.
John: all at once.
John: And it wasn't really the asylums, because I've said that for years, too.
John: That's one of those like, oh, you know, as soon as they shut down the asylums, the whole world went sideways.
Merlin: I accept and incorporate your turns out.
John: That's a good turns out.
John: Yeah, but it was really HUD.
John: And since that time, there's been no, I mean, no politician has successfully re-
John: Well, Ben Carson's going to bring it back, I think.
John: I think you're right.
John: He's got his fucking finger on the pulse.
John: He knows.
John: He's got the HUD magic wand.
John: He's ready to roll.
John: He does.
John: I came away from running for office realizing a lot more.
John: One of the, I think, the most profound lessons I learned was what the limitations of government are.
John: Because I was absolutely a person.
John: Like the practical limitations?
John: Absolutely.
John: The practical limitations.
John: And it often, often, often comes down to how do you enforce that?
John: I'm not just talking about like
John: Going and knocking on the door and saying, you cannot do this.
Merlin: You're getting at my favorite question to ask when anybody has a big idea, which is, and then what happens?
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: People don't want to go two or three and then what happens into their cockamamie idea.
Merlin: No, they don't.
Merlin: And then what happens?
John: They don't even want to go to what happens.
John: And as I was reading this website on what to do if your neighbor has a dog that barks all night.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: At each sentence, which they are trying to put out there to answer all these next door people of like, well, first, we'd like you to document every incident.
Merlin: Oh, all right.
Merlin: That seems awesome.
John: You know, like in a journal that you're keeping about your hatred for your neighbors.
John: And I read that and I'm like, oh.
John: This is step one.
John: First, you need to more hyper attenuate to what it is that's hanging you up.
John: Well, and also from their standpoint, they're saying, let's give them some difficult, busy work.
John: And maybe like 10% of the people will realize that that's too much work for them.
John: And they'll just, they'll resign themselves to the dog because they don't want to keep a journal.
John: And then the next thing is after you've kept a journal for 60 days,
John: At any point of which you might just give up and not bother them anymore.
John: Right.
John: Then write a letter to your neighbor explaining what you... Oh, and also it says, it's always better to go talk to your neighbor in person.
John: Rather than write them a letter.
John: So, right there, 30% of the people are like, I'm not going to go over there and talk to them.
John: So, that 30%.
John: Anyway, you go down this list of what the city is asking you to do to make this complaint.
John: Every step of the way is an attempt to get you to be resigned to the problem.
John: Right?
John: It's just like.
John: Oh, I don't want to keep a journal.
John: Go talk to the neighbor.
John: Write a letter.
John: Submit a complaint.
John: Wait 30 days.
John: If they haven't replied to the complaint after 30 days, send another complaint and then wait another 30 days.
John: Like, I don't want to do all that.
John: And so, fuck it.
John: I'll just deal with it.
John: And that's exactly what they're trying to get you to do.
John: Yeah.
John: Because the end result of all of it is that two people from the city knock on the door.
John: of the neighbors and say we've had a complaint about your dog and the person in the house says well that's just what dogs do and the cops go yeah we know but there's been a complaint and you have 90 days to rectify the situation or we'll come back out
John: And have this conversation again.
John: And it's like, and those people, can you imagine their job?
Merlin: They're not going to assign to their crackerjack agents to basically just camp out and make sure it's taken care of.
John: No.
John: And they're not, they're not going to, they're not sitting there reading your next door.
John: They're not going to come with two crack agents and park across the street from this place at three in the morning to make sure that the dog is barking.
John: Like the whole thing is based around the idea where the city is,
John: Knows the city itself knows we just can't deal with this.
Merlin: It's just too There's just too many of these because there's the guy on the other side of town that's running a generator all night and these guys have a have Have loud music playing and this guy's got no soup and this is over here and dip but then also You you also didn't get into the situation where they say okay Let's say we really need to do a Rudy Giuliani here and we're really gonna collapse on one two three aspects of
Merlin: of these quality of life problems.
Merlin: Well, then what do you get?
Merlin: I mean, if they do collapse on that, now you are going to hear from the folks who are like, you've got to be kidding me.
Merlin: Don't you have more important things to do?
Merlin: Don't you have a murder to solve rather than being dog cops?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Do you know, in your kid's school, if you can say, are you familiar with something called restorative practices?
Merlin: Do you have that in your school?
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: I've never heard of it.
Merlin: It's kind of a big thing.
Merlin: It's a big thing right now.
Merlin: You can Google it.
Merlin: I mean, the short version is it's, well, here, let me read you what it says on the internet science page.
Merlin: The social science of restorative practices offers a common thread to tie together theory, research, and practice in diverse fields such as education, counseling, criminal justice, DLAD, developing models and methodology, performing empirical research, da, da, da.
Merlin: They're not really explaining this very well.
Merlin: So, like, if a kid... If kids get into a fight or screaming at each other at school, there's this whole... A big part of the praxis at our kids' school is they are very much a restorative practice at school where you, like, take... You take them aside and you talk about what happened and you talk about... It's this whole process they go through that they're very into and it mostly...
Merlin: makes a giant amount of sense it's a great way to like get the heat out of the situation and talk about like what happened who's aggrieved what we're going to do about it and but the reason i mentioned it here is first of all i think it's an interesting idea um but also it ultimately is to minimize the amount of arbitrary discipline and frontier justice that has to happen to fix things
Merlin: And it works okay a lot of the time, especially with the younger kids.
Merlin: With the younger kids, who do have a more innate sense of justice than a lot of us realize, they'll at least feel bad about it, and they might apologize.
Merlin: But then, you know, a friend of ours as a kid got essentially, I don't want to say jumped, but he got punched at school.
Merlin: So you know what you do, you go into restorative practices.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Merlin: and and my wife was telling me about this and i'm like oh man like i i get that and i think that's good but like what if that kid's just a fucking bully and like the poor kids who get punched by this asshole have got to sit down in little plastic chairs and look into each other's eyes and talk about their feelings and it's like but she's like no that's the point of restorative practices also is like that kid's probably bull he's a bully because he's getting bullied and there is though that some part of me that's like i do want the frontier justice
Merlin: I want that kid harmed for being a bully.
Merlin: And I know that's the wrong attitude.
Merlin: But I think this also goes for government with what you're describing, which is they need you to go and try to work this out because they do not have a team of paratroopers that are going to come in and solve it for you.
Merlin: They have capacity of scale to deal with a certain amount of paperwork that they can pass on to other people, but they do not have a dedicated dog force.
John: Well, and it's to the question of
John: What do you want?
John: What do you want a city to do?
John: Or what do you want government to do?
John: And and keep coming back to that, doesn't it?
John: What restorative practice is, is, you know, this is this is a glimpse inside kind of the liberal worldview, which is that we're trying to make the world a better place.
John: And restorative practice is not just something designed around the the simple aspect of like teaching kids problem solving.
John: It's much bigger.
John: It's an idea that the schools have that they are creating a society, right?
John: That we are creating kids not just to solve their problem in the middle.
Merlin: Trying to make better kids that can solve problems.
John: Better kids that can make a better world.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: And so the vision of a better world then is the second and third question.
John: Well, what's your vision of a better world?
John: Then what happens?
Merlin: Right.
John: And then what happens?
John: Well, the better world that we're trying to promote is one where there's no discrimination, where there's equal opportunity for everyone, where, um, there are, but you know, at a certain point you get into a world where you're asking and you're asking, and then what happens?
John: And you very quickly get into a place where in order to make the world better, which, and better by our definition, we're going to have to prohibit
John: some behaviors.
John: And that prohibition of behavior, the list of behaviors that is prohibited now in order to create a world where everyone is free, that list of behavior starts to get longer and longer.
John: Well, we have to prohibit this, we have to prohibit that.
John: And at a certain point, we have to start prohibiting families of behaviors, or we have to start prohibiting, in a way, prohibiting schools of thought
John: Because schools of thought lead to certain families of behaviors.
Merlin: Yeah, you're going to have to start monitoring frames of mind.
John: Frames of mind, right.
John: And now we're monitoring how families interact, how families, the frames of minds of whole families and communities.
Yeah.
John: And so now you have people at the school district.
John: They're not maybe necessarily at each school, but up at the school district, you have people whose job it is to start, you know, it becomes very theoretical at that point.
Merlin: It has to.
Merlin: It has to become more and more abstract.
Merlin: And the more abstract it becomes, the more things are going to get caught in the net if you enforce it.
Merlin: Right.
John: And if you're looking at problems that adults are having in the world,
John: And then theorizing about the cause of those problems, the source of those problems, and then theorizing about what you could do to children in order to change the behavior of some imaginary future generation that you don't want to have have these problems.
John: There's a whole chain, a whole intestinal system of theories that you're progressing through.
John: that each time you have a theory and then you move on to the next step, what you're doing is you're, the theory that you had is gradually calcifying into what you imagine is a fact.
John: So you're looking at behaviors of adults and you're saying, I bet you that's because they didn't have enough vitamin C. Well, we need to get more vitamin C in the schools.
John: And as you turn your focus to getting more vitamin C's in the schools, you forget that your original thoughts
John: Theory was just a theory.
John: You don't know if that's true.
John: You don't know if it's vitamin C or not.
John: That was just an idea you had one day.
John: It might be vitamin D. But you had that theory, and then you pivot to how do we get vitamin C into our schools to solve this problem?
John: And so behind you now, there's a theory that's turned to a fact.
John: Well, then you say, well, let's talk to these people about putting vitamin C in their toothpaste, right?
John: And now like you're now the last, your last supposition or your last theory now also is a fact.
John: And pretty soon you're all the way up to some public meeting where you're screaming in someone's face, you're trying to keep vitamin C out of our kids and you're, that's going to create world war.
John: And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John: You don't, I mean, we're, I'm still all the way back at what does vitamin C have to do with it?
John: Yeah.
John: And that's what's so crazy about restorative justice sounds amazing.
John: But when you scratch the surface of its intent, its intention isn't just like, let's get Bobby and Billy to solve this whose ball it is problem on their own.
John: And it's way more about a whole universe of how do we
John: How do we get people to vote for a president that doesn't like actively want war?
John: You know, like it's there is a kind of civilization building that's been happening coming out of the universities, I think.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I mean, you're also talking about straws in some ways.
Merlin: Like we've glommed onto this thing because we saw the turtle video.
Merlin: Again, it's very important you not contact me about this.
Merlin: This is the biggest issue of our day.
Merlin: Well, also.
Merlin: And also now we've got an emotional hook into us.
Merlin: And now that's our framing for this problem is that we tut-tut our neighbors about whether they put the green bottles in with the clear bottles.
Merlin: And it's like, yeah, but what about Bitcoin mining?
Yeah.
Merlin: What about all this other stuff that is so much more consequential in some ways?
John: Well, the garbage trucks go into those big facilities through four separate doors that are different colors.
John: And then when you go on the other side, it's just like the Beatles apartment in Help.
LAUGHTER
John: Eleanor Braun's watching Ringo not play the drums.
John: They just all dump their garbage into the same sunken living room.
Merlin: Can I tell you one of my... Let's do a number round.
Merlin: I want to show you one of my favorite numbers that I discovered this summer.
Merlin: This feels like a Sesame Street episode.
Merlin: Well, it could be.
Merlin: It could be Slate Money.
Merlin: It could be Sesame Street.
Merlin: Merlin's favorite numbers.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
John: Is your favorite number the number of monies you would have if you had invested in Bitcoin in 2003?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'll have to think on that.
Merlin: I'll pray on that.
Merlin: I mean, I'm a 37 man.
Merlin: I usually pick 37, which is the number most people pick.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: 37 is the random number between 1 and 100 most people pick.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: It feels the most random.
Merlin: 37?
Merlin: 37.
Merlin: So if you ever want to scam me.
John: Pick a number between 1 and 100.
John: 37.
John: And then I'll already have 37 written on a card.
John: And I'll say, is this your number?
Merlin: Click on Muni Metro, that link.
Merlin: Okay, Muni Metro.
Merlin: So the streetcar line in modern times has had three different types of streetcars.
Merlin: When I first moved here, it was these—let me pull this up.
Merlin: When I first moved here, it was these Boeings.
Merlin: It was the orange and white ones.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: you might have seen.
Merlin: And they transitioned into the very heavy Brita, the Italian streetcars that you hear clamoring by very loudly.
Merlin: As of the last year or so, they've introduced this new car from Siemens that's very updated, very modern.
Merlin: You know, I love a table like this, the rolling stock comparison.
Merlin: What a great title for a table.
Merlin: Yeah, uh-huh.
Merlin: Let me point your attention.
Merlin: So you can see they're all very interesting.
Merlin: You can see, look at weight, for example.
Merlin: You see that the reason they're so loud and so thunderous is you can see how the Boeing was 67,000 pounds, the Brita 79,000.
Merlin: The Siemens is a little lighter.
Merlin: Let me turn your attention to that final row.
Merlin: Look at distance between failures.
Merlin: The cars that ran from 79 to 02 had a failure on average every 2,000 miles.
Merlin: Not great, but...
Merlin: No.
Merlin: The Brita, and this has not been borne out locally yet because these are still new cars.
Merlin: So the original cars, those orange ones where you used to be able to go sit on the steps, they were really cool.
Merlin: They would have a failure every 2,000 miles.
Merlin: The Britas, the Italian ones that we have mostly here now, had a failure every 5,500 miles.
Merlin: Oh, more than twice as good.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Please tell our listeners what the distance between failures is for the new ones.
Merlin: 59,000 miles.
Merlin: Can that be true?
Merlin: 10 times.
Merlin: More than 10 times fewer failures on average.
Merlin: I know I'm not a statistics guy.
Merlin: Isn't that a mind-blowing figure when you look at the previous two?
John: It is.
John: I mean, you cannot, because they've only been in service since 2017, you cannot exactly say that's true.
Merlin: And you can't localize it to here.
Merlin: Who knows what that's going to be locally.
Merlin: But even if it's a tenth of that, it's better.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's incredible.
Merlin: This is the kind of turns out.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: This is what I was trying to say earlier with the transit stuff when people go, oh, I don't want street cars.
Merlin: It's like, well, they're getting better.
John: I mean, it's not just that.
John: Like if you took a look at this table and I bet you there is one, a table that compares the Siemens to the latest buses for the same.
Merlin: Oh, God, forget about it.
Merlin: Well, think about all the many more different kinds of moving parts.
Merlin: Even if you're running on a line, if you're running on an electric line overhead, like a lot of the buses are.
Merlin: Shit dog, the buses that are going up and down Van Ness Avenue, give me a break.
Merlin: Those things are going to be trashed.
John: But then the people will say, well, because there's a lot of emotion in public transit.
John: And this is a thing that I think people that are looking in from outside don't understand, how emotional the issue is.
John: And you talk to people who say.
John: Especially me living half a block from one.
John: I am very emotional about it.
John: I can't wait to hear it come by again to punctuate this conversation.
John: But there are people who say, like you, I don't want to ride a bus, but I will ride a trolley.
John: And there are a lot of people who say, what's the fucking difference?
Merlin: And you go, well, when you're done, I'm going to give you my turns out on this and it's going to be so stupid and emotional.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: Just write a bus.
Merlin: Write a bus like everybody else.
Merlin: Like all the other poor people.
Merlin: Write a bus.
John: Yeah, write a bus.
John: And you're like, but a trolley is elegant and a trolley is neat.
John: And when you're talking about transit to people and you say you need to make transit neato so that it's better than something that feels like business.
John: like dirty and lame and people, oh, they scoff and they, they, they roll their eyes, but you're like, well, look, people who buy cars, like there are people who get the cheapest grayest car because it's the most efficient.
John: And those people probably work in government, but everybody else is trying to
Merlin: buy a neato car like this stuff matters to people it's so abstract if you're a fucking car owner i'm sorry but if you're a car owner this is all so abstract to you all of this is just shit that's in your way if you're a car owner because you have sunk costs and beliefs as a car owner that make it very difficult to see this as anything other than what giving money to people in africa like this this seems so abstract to you because you don't need it it's just a nuisance to you for so many people
John: And a big, big argument that happens in this world is which one of these systems is less in the way of cars?
Merlin: Well, I'll tell you one thing.
Merlin: They change the seating in these.
Merlin: So they have seating around the perimeter.
Merlin: The ones that you've been on, like when you're here, those are the middle ones, the Brita ones.
Merlin: Those are the ones where there's rows of two seats.
Merlin: These have seating around the perimeter.
Merlin: and then mostly standing space.
Merlin: These hold 60 people seated.
Merlin: I would not want to be on one of these that had 203 people, but 203 people can travel on that train and go to stops and then go to Safeway.
Merlin: 203 people can travel on a car?
Merlin: This is, well, you know it's confusing.
Merlin: They say one car.
Merlin: It's really like two cars.
Merlin: It looks like two cars.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: But, you know, the standard, it's really confusing to people because it's really two carlettes.
Merlin: that are hooked together.
Merlin: Two-carlets.
Merlin: Well, because think about how it works.
Merlin: It has to be able to go forward or reverse.
Merlin: That's why it's like a playing card.
Merlin: It has a cockpit at both ends, so it can go forward and backwards if it needs to.
Merlin: Do they ever hook forward together?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's called a two-car train.
Merlin: That's the other difference with these, is that you can hook up to...
Merlin: like you know bart bart has like like tons and tons of those but i can't find the stat in here right now but you can hook i think up to like five of these together where you can only do two of those with the old ones so if it were to end judah during rush hour and the streets can accommodate it i mean you got a fucking stew going that's right well and you can't do that with a bus right you can't put five buses together
John: But there are a lot of people who are like, buses just use the streets.
John: So they're not in the way of cars the same way that if you sequester a train over to the side and give it a dedicated path, you're just taking a lane away.
John: It's like, well, you're also, I mean, think about what it's like to drive in a city where the roads are full of buses.
John: Like, it's not like your lane is somehow super liberated.
Merlin: A streetcar doesn't cut you off.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: A streetcar is on a fucking track.
Merlin: It's not going to do what bus drivers in this town do, which is act like mental patients.
Merlin: They're so crazy.
Yeah.
John: I love streetcars, and I will argue for them all day, all day and night.
Merlin: Look at Portland, man.
Merlin: Portland.
Merlin: You can actually, at the airport, you just get on a fucking streetcar and go where you want to go.
Merlin: It's amazing.
John: So infuriating.
John: Everything that they do in Portland that makes Portland better and that shows the world how to go just makes me so mad.
Merlin: So fucking angry.
Merlin: Fucking hate them.
Merlin: I love the idea of Portland.
Merlin: um i and so here's my turns out here's the emotional part and i think i've told you this before i think you've probably seen this before i'd be curious if you have a similar observation this is not in any this is not peculiar uh to my unusually like keep to yourself chinese neighborhood it's true in pretty much every neighborhood people fucking act differently on a streetcar they do they act they comport themselves better
Merlin: They're not shucking and jiving as much.
Merlin: They're not fucking with people as much.
Merlin: I don't know exactly why.
Merlin: Somebody should write a thesis on this.
Merlin: But I'm just here to tell you, having ridden a lot of streetcars and a lot of buses and a lot of BART, is that pound for pound, mile for mile, there's less bullshit on a train and people act better on a train.
Merlin: It's because... First of all, am I completely fucking insane?
Merlin: Am I anywhere in the ballpark?
Merlin: Do you notice this?
Merlin: It's absolutely true.
John: And it's because even if you ride the streetcar every day...
John: and do it for decades.
John: The streetcar is fun.
John: It just is.
John: It is.
John: It is.
John: And part of the reason it's fun is that the streetcar goes, the streetcar goes
John: Like it's, it's like ding ding.
John: Hey, here it comes.
John: Hey buddy, here it comes.
John: Hey John, here it comes.
John: And when you talk about it at public meetings that way, and you say, here's why we need gondolas in Seattle.
John: It's because it's because they're fucking fun and people go to the land of make-believe.
John: Yeah.
John: People are going to take it because it takes 45 minutes to take the train.
John: And people imagine when they get in their car that it only takes 10 minutes because they've done that drive one time where it took them 10 minutes.
Merlin: And so that's what they think of talking.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: We all do that.
Merlin: You come up with the crazy, any time you got to go anywhere, you come up with the least amount of time it's ever taken.
Merlin: And then you take off 10% and go, that's how long it should take.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I do it.
Merlin: At like 4 a.m.
Merlin: on a Sunday, I did this in 35 minutes once.
John: And so even though it takes an hour and 45 minutes, and I know it does.
Merlin: Oh, if you do the min, max, median, and mean, you're going to see some patterns that will blow your mind.
John: But if you say this at a meeting where people are trying to apportion money to different programs, and you say, look, if you build gondolas, if you build choo-choo's,
John: People will take them.
John: They will.
John: They'll get out of their cars because they feel like their lives are fun.
John: And I know that's crazy.
John: I know that when we're talking about building cities, we're thinking about...
John: Like a collective of workers who all are dressed in blue uniforms.
John: I mean, I don't know what we're envisioning.
John: Mostly driving cars.
John: Mostly one person in a car going somewhere.
John: But we cannot ever... You cannot talk in public about making...
John: about building public projects or making things that are fun.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: People talk about this with Apple, like whatever happened to the whimsy, whatever happened to the fun of like having a laptop with a little light that pulses that's roughly close to the human heartbeat, like whatever happened.
Merlin: Can you have whimsy in your town?
Merlin: Can you have fun?
Merlin: Can you have coolness in your town?
John: I mean, when you talk about public housing, what ends up happening is people have all these examples of like, well, we built this public housing and the people that lived there
John: Didn't care about it and they started throwing trash down the stairwells and pretty soon it was uninhabitable and we had to tear it down.
John: And it's very hard to say like, well, when you built those things, did you build them in a way that would give anyone pride in living there?
John: Like, did you make the, did you give the windows a view?
John: Did you make the spaces like cheery and amenable?
Merlin: Well, no, it was a white collar prison.
Merlin: Like you basically put up the the de minimis cheapest thing you have in a bunch of bright lights that are on all night.
Merlin: And they say, oh, look, all the poor people live there and cause problems.
John: Yeah.
John: And they they they get out of they get out like a little digital calculator and they're like, well, if we make the ceilings eight foot tall, it will cost an extra 30 cents per mile.
John: But if we make them seven feet tall, you know, we can save 10 10 cents on everything.
John: And then we can take that back and we're on time and under budget.
John: And you just don't realize every little decision like that that robs the world of whimsy.
John: It creates the it creates the problems that you that you're later trying to solve.
John: It ends up being more expensive in the long run because and it's impossible.
John: It's impossible to do a single study that demonstrates this.
John: But, you know, when you go and say we need a budget for this and some of that budget is going to be for a sunny lobby.
John: That serves no purpose other than to give people a place to congregate.
John: Or we're going to put a little bit of trim over the doors so that it feels, you know, less like army housing and more like a home.
John: And that's going to cost a little bit of money.
John: It really will.
John: It costs money.
John: We know.
John: We know it does.
John: But, like...
John: And it's not a thing that you need to do 50 university studies on.
John: You can just imagine yourself living there and imagine what little it would take to make you feel like, oh, this is my home and not just someplace that I've been shunted.
John: And this is the little train I ride to work and not just the most efficient location.
Merlin: uh like or and by efficient i mean like what's the easiest thing to put on the road tomorrow a bus you go buy one let me be clear i'm not anti-bus buses are important and like you use buses they make tons of sense there's certain kinds of places where there aren't tracks and it doesn't make sense and you can deploy you can deploy more buses when needed it's much more flexible in some ways i'm not against buses at all either yeah just don't at me
Merlin: I will ban you.
Merlin: This is 2011.
Merlin: If you take just cars, just cars for people registered in San Francisco.
Merlin: This is 2011.
Merlin: There was about 380,000 cars in San Francisco.
Merlin: There are 320,000 street parking spaces, including meters.
Merlin: If you account for the vehicles that also come into San Francisco because they come here to work, so during the daytime from Monday through Friday in San Francisco, 505
Merlin: vehicles in the city and 320,000 street parking spaces.
John: So 200,000 of those people are just driving around in circles.
Merlin: I guess they're going to the Stockton Street garage.
Merlin: I'm not sure.
John: No, that would count as parking spaces, right?
John: I'm sure they...
Merlin: this is i guess just street parking but you know this is again one of those things where once you start talking about this it's sort of like our president and his 17 angry democrats and that number keeps getting higher and higher every week or so they're like there's 75 million vehicles in san francisco and 47 parking spaces it does it does get more exaggerated well the the crazy thing for me has been and i and i have to
John: And I think I knew this before, but running for office really just hammered it into me.
John: And it's a practice, right?
John: You have to think about it.
John: You have to turns out yourself every day.
John: You have to think about it every day when you're like, oh.
Merlin: You're sort of rejecting the obvious thing that you think makes sense to you in favor of new information?
Merlin: Well, a little.
John: And trying to say to yourself, what is...
John: like you were saying, like, and then what happens?
John: And just ask yourself that about every single thing that comes into your head is like, it's so obvious.
John: Why don't they just, why don't they just station two guys across the street from the people where my dogs are barking?
John: Or why don't we just ban all war and, you know, and give everybody a lollipop?
John: Or why don't we, why don't we just have an executive order?
John: There's no more war allowed.
John: Why don't we just house all the homeless?
John: Like every single thing that you feel is obvious is,
John: And simple, just start at the start and then keep asking and then what happens.
John: And then what happens.
John: And what you end up with is this situation with the people across the street where – with the barking dog where you're like, the government – this is not a job for them.
John: This is – the government has a webpage that makes it seem like they're acknowledging that this is their job because they had to because –
John: people were calling nine one one or something you know they had to put something up yes to indicate like yes we are responsive to your concerns but the whole job of that web page is to divert you and get you a wave and the people who would follow their steps all the way through are insane people you know like they're mad and what happens is the the people do the cops do come out and they're like yeah you got to get your dog to stop barking and if the people with the dog are like that's what dogs do
John: That's when the people that followed all the steps go on next door and are like, I followed all the steps and nothing happened.
John: And what they're not realizing is this isn't something that you want government to do.
John: If we had government and cops that were actually empowered to keep your neighbor's dog from barking, those people would have too much power.
John: They would be doing other things.
John: They'd be a menace.
John: You would have cops knocking on people's doors all the time.
John: Open up dog cops.
John: And there would be a lot more cops.
John: And you would be empowering them and funding them to be doing things that you would say like, well, wait a minute.
John: I just wanted the dogs to stop barking.
John: I didn't want cops to have the power to knock on people's doors and make them do things.
Yeah.
John: And it's like, well.
Merlin: Instead, we have these professional distraction forms.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
John: Like, you know, Mohammed, Sidney, and Clayton.
John: All the cops had to do was hire one person to write a web page that was like, here's the 42 steps.
John: It's time to go to lunch.
Merlin: We nailed it, guys.
Merlin: And then what happens?
Merlin: Your form gets sent.
John: And then what happens?
John: Your form is received.
John: The form is received.
John: And then what happens?
John: Well, they send you a receipt for your form.
John: After we've received the form, wait 40 days, and then you'll get a receipt for the form.
Merlin: Or, you know, you won't.
Merlin: Just keep sending the form.
John: And on and on and on and on and on.
John: uh and and and the danger i mean i feel this and you you've talked about this a lot but the schools in particular are are like an incubating petri dish of this kind of thing and the schools can't get away they can't just give you this like brush off oh but they also get your when you were running for office you know they get that in spades
Merlin: you know there's like a 90-10 in terms of the neediness of this parent over that parent.
Merlin: Oh, it's insane, right?
John: And when I went in to talk to the principal about –
John: It was a great year because I went in early on to talk to the principal about standardized testing.
John: And at that time, I didn't have one of my front teeth, which is always a thing that happens sometimes around the first of the year.
John: Did you put your feet up like you did at Sub Pop?
John: No, I just went up to her on the playground and I think maybe I was wearing... Listen, we need to discuss this.
John: Listen, I'm Marlo's dad.
John: And I think I might have been wearing a fedora with a giant peacock feather in it.
John: I'm not 100% sure.
Merlin: Are you a pickup artist, sir?
John: But, you know, she gave me the real principal reply, which was kind of she gazed off into the distance as though she was making sure some kids weren't hitting each other with hockey sticks.
John: And she said, well, standardized testing is not really a thing that we put that much stock in, but we have to do it because we're doing it.
John: And.
John: And when they get the results, they don't really do anything with it.
John: But eventually it is how schools are funded and it is how they're judged.
John: And so we do end up tailoring everything to it.
John: But we don't really.
John: And it was just like, wow.
John: And what I found out later in the year was the principal –
John: My daughter's school was a massive long winters fan and she didn't recognize.
John: Oh, shit dog.
John: And so I kept going into her office.
John: I ended up doing it at the end of the year.
John: But at the beginning of the year, I was like, let's talk about standardized testing.
John: And she was just she was just like giving me the because because you could you could see she's had this conversation with 800 parents.
John: Sure.
John: And the ones that, that have more confidence that roll up on her, she just has more confidence in redirecting their energy.
John: Uh, but later on in the year, somebody said, Oh, you know, that's the guy from the long winters.
John: And she was like, titter, titter, titter.
John: And then all of a sudden, right.
John: I could have said, well, we should do around here is eliminate standardized testing and put in helicopter.
John: She takes on a notebook.
John: That will bring, you know, that'll bring order to our community.
John: Uh, but, but in fact, you know, she was a, she was like a,
John: she's a professional educator and her whole job is to, she's also a professional administrator and administrator.
John: Her whole job is to be in between, in between me and the people who are ordering her to, to test students.
John: And in the meantime, she has to deal with teachers and kids all day.
John: And that's what her real job is.
John: Deal with teachers and kids.
John: And I,
John: And I looked at that and I looked at the standardized testing and I looked at, you know, because because my kid came home a couple of times and was in in tears.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, it's the worst.
John: And I was like, what happened?
John: She's like, I'm terrible at tests.
John: There's so much stress.
John: And so I went to them and I was like, she says she's terrible at tests.
John: And the reply was, well, see, it's a computerized thing.
John: And if they keep answering questions correctly, the questions get harder because
John: The computer makes the questions get harder until they reach the point where they can't answer them.
John: And that's how we're testing the
John: Something that we're testing, like the limits of their knowledge.
John: And I was like, it seems to me like what you're doing is you are inculcating in children horror about tests because the test will not end until you failed.
John: Yeah.
John: People want to do well on tests.
John: They want to feel like they did well.
John: And they're like, oh, yeah.
John: Well, tell her not to worry because the test will just keep getting harder until until she can't answer the question.
John: That's the way somebody probably you have hope.
John: Or like – or you have any sense of like that there is a standard that you can ever meet, right?
John: And so I said to her like, look, the computer just keeps getting harder until you reach an answer that you can't answer.
Yeah.
John: she's just like confused and i'm confused because does that mean if you ever like what if the first question on the test you can't answer or like what if what if you answer five questions and then you don't know the answer do you just like lean back and go well i guess i got to the limits of this computer like do they really make that clear to the kids that that's how it works
Merlin: Not at all.
Merlin: I'm sure they don't.
Merlin: And so their parents have never experienced anything like that.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: And you're like, why is every kid sad now?
John: Well, and you know, I loved taking tests because tests were, uh, they were measurable.
John: You could just answer the question and then at the end you would get a grade.
John: Like it was a, it was simple.
John: It wasn't, nobody got to, um,
John: It wasn't an essay.
John: It was, uh, nobody could say like, well, your writing is good, but your topic was little weird.
John: So see, it was just like, here are the answers.
John: Well, what if I, what if you'd taken the SAT and the questions had just kept getting harder?
John: I mean, I don't understand where they're coming with.
John: Who came up with this?
Merlin: What theory is this?
Merlin: Even if you score off the charts, you find out later, you're still going to walk away feeling like the biggest loser.
Merlin: I don't know if people understand how stressful this is for kids.
Merlin: It is very stressful for my kid.
Merlin: who scores, she's in the highest everything at everything.
Merlin: And she's really good at stuff, like statistically, like on the paper, like she's really good.
Merlin: I mean, she's like, her reading level's off the charts.
Merlin: Her math is the highest percentile, you know, over here.
Merlin: She still stresses over all this stuff so bad.
Merlin: And this, she's told me before something you just said, but in her dumb kid way, where she's like, yeah, well, they do the test and every kid gets different questions and the questions change.
Merlin: And I was like, what does that mean?
Merlin: But I think this might be what...
Merlin: It is.
Merlin: This is exactly what she, this is what the principal said.
John: Like every kid gets different questions.
John: What a horrible thing to do to a kid.
John: And the questions change.
Merlin: So it's like the spelling bee where you're... I thought it was a cheating thing.
Merlin: I thought it was a thing to like keep people from cheating.
Merlin: But if you're taking it on a computer and it's dynamically changing as you're doing it...
Merlin: You're just going to keep going until you fail.
John: Well, and in a way, I feel like it comes from, and every time I talk about computers on this program, I get a lot of angry letters.
John: That's a vocation.
John: From John Syracuse.
Merlin: Would you like to let people know you'll ban them if they do that?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: I don't even know how to ban them.
Merlin: I'll ban them.
John: But computers, it's one of these things where if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
John: If you have a computer that can randomize questions and make it harder every time,
John: What are you going to do?
John: Not use it?
John: What are you going to do?
John: Just have that computer duplicate a little special paper test?
Merlin: Oh, it's a Jurassic Park type situation.
John: Yeah, or are you going to train the computer to do things all kinds of tricky ways?
John: Because you can show some graphs to somebody that's buying systems and say, look what our system can do.
John: It's dynamic.
John: Yeah, it's not just some kind of photocopier.
John: This thing is dynamic education.
John: Ugh.
John: And you're just like, wow, it's like a defense contractor in a way.
Merlin: If you're tempted to email us or contact us about this, if you're somebody who actually works in the industry, I just want to just in the nicest way possible, I really want to encourage you to not contact us about this.
Merlin: It's very important that you do that.
Merlin: You know what, John?
Merlin: Go to Reddit.
Merlin: Go on a Reddit about this.
Merlin: No!
Merlin: No!
Merlin: I will not.
Merlin: Not you, the listener.
Merlin: The listener, if you have things to share with people, you get on a 4chan, an 8chan, a 16chan, whatever chan or a Reddit, you go on a Reddit and you can discuss these points of view in a very lively way.
John: I went on a Reddit the other day.
John: Aw, Jiminy.
John: Well, because this podcast I do about war movies, Friendly Fire, apparently it has an active Reddit community.
John: Oh, that's cool.
John: And I went on very nice.
John: Well, they can be, but also they cannot be.
John: And I went on and, you know, the two the other two guys on that program have a show about Star Trek.
John: Yes.
John: And the theme of that show and of that community is very.
John: Yes.
John: And like no one.
John: I mean, if if you say like, oh, Star Trek is ridiculous.
John: Everybody goes the new generation community is very kind to each other.
John: Super supportive.
John: Everybody agrees with each other.
John: Ninety nine percent.
John: And the one percent they disagree.
John: It's very friendly disagreement.
John: And it's like like really like a Canadian disagreement.
John: It's yeah.
John: It's sort of like, oh, triples.
John: Am I right?
John: Or I don't know.
John: They don't have triples in Next Generation, but whatever.
John: It's all very friendly.
John: And so these two guys brought a lot of their fans from their show about Star Trek over to our show about war movies.
John: Where I say, no, I do not agree with you.
John: And I also do not agree to disagree.
John: I just flat out disagree with not only your take on this war movie, but your entire premise about how the world works.
John: And let me explain to you about Vietnam.
John: And also about Napoleon.
John: Oh, boy.
Merlin: Bonaparte.
John: We call him Bonaparte.
John: And also about the 30 Years War.
John: And, you know, my co-hosts are my friends.
John: And we have a very good time.
John: It's super fun for us.
John: But there are people who have come from that other show who get their feelings hurt.
John: Oh, okay.
John: And they get their feelings hurt just because I'm a meanie.
John: I'm a meanie pants.
John: Oh, right.
John: And so there was a Reddit where somebody said, because we just did Star Wars because it has the word wars in the title.
John: A little bit of a stretch.
John: And so one of the guys was like, no, it's a war movie.
John: And I was like, it's definitely not.
John: But, you know, you have co-hosts.
John: You have to collaborate with people.
John: I know you know about this.
John: Yes.
John: Collaborating.
John: You have to do what they say sometimes.
John: Collaborating.
John: And so somebody's on there and they're like, I haven't listened to the episode yet because I don't want to hear what old grouchy Roderick has to say about my favorite movie.
Man.
John: Star Wars.
John: And I'm on this Reddit because somebody on the program was like, you got to go look at the Reddit, man.
John: Everybody's like loving it over there.
John: People have such a different conception of what a fun thing is.
John: And so I read this comment.
Merlin: A couple of people over here weren't total dicks.
Merlin: You should check it out.
John: And I wrote a reply to them, which I don't think they were expecting.
John: Oh, dear.
John: Where I said, what can I say or do on this program to make you stop listening sooner?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And they deleted their comment and then wrote me, then commented on my comment saying, I apologize.
John: Oh, geez.
John: That's not good for anybody.
John: And now I'm like, oh, oh, oh.
John: You should check your privilege.
John: Here's what I needed to do.
John: Not go on Reddit.
John: Hey, guys.
John: Hey, guys.
John: Wall.
John: This is not for me.
John: This is for you.
John: You guys do this.
John: I don't belong here.
John: I don't want to hear what you say.
John: I don't want any replies.
John: Ready?
John: Ready?
John: Choo-choo.
John: Hi, trolley.
John: We're going to the lake of the big, please.