Ep. 402: "Time to Move Some Furniture Around"
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: How's your emotions?
John: Is your emotions good?
Merlin: There sure are a lot of them.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, shit.
Merlin: Tiptoe through the tulips.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know whether to lean in.
Merlin: To my bundle of nerveness or to seek some kind of sweet, sweet relief or both?
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: What do you think?
John: You know, for people listening in the far off distant future, it's the day before the election.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: The election.
Merlin: Yes.
John: The big election.
John: That's right.
John: And that's on everybody's mind here at the studio, here at the studio where Merlin and I record.
John: Hello.
John: Hello.
John: Getting behind the glass.
John: I, um, you know, obviously I'm in a heightened emotional state.
John: Uh, but, um, but, um, yeah, I don't really have a lot to add to that.
John: I, you know, daylight savings time has worked in my, uh, to, in my favor this one time, uh, because I,
John: For whatever, you know, however it lined up, I was able to get a full night's sleep last night.
John: Whoa.
John: And so I had like eight and a half hours of sleep.
Merlin: What?
John: And I'm just kind of sitting here like it.
John: I woke up.
John: an hour ago and looked at twitter for some of that time and you know had a breakfast cookie uh looked looked at some drawings my daughter had done like like full-fledged functioning grown-up adult person came downstairs podcasting huh
John: So it's a new day for me.
John: This will last between three and four days before I'm back staying up all night.
Merlin: It's a real mixed bag for me.
Merlin: Like you, I have been going to bed, quote unquote, earlier.
Merlin: I have been consequently getting up earlier.
Merlin: And today was really cool because, I mean, just personal anecdote.
Merlin: I woke up at, I don't know, five something probably.
Merlin: And I went to the restroom and I micturated and I realized that my kid's light was on.
Merlin: And then I did the only sane thing, which is I texted her.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: I texted her.
Merlin: From outside her door?
Merlin: How long have you been up?
Merlin: She said, oh, only half an hour.
Merlin: I said, you want to take a walk?
Merlin: And she's like, sure.
Merlin: So before, like, we could take a sunrise walk.
Merlin: And so we took a nice long walk.
Merlin: And it's difficult where we live to see the actual sunrise owing to the giant hill between us and the east.
Merlin: But we had a real nice time.
Merlin: We got a coffee.
Merlin: I got a coffee.
Merlin: She got a hot chocolate.
Merlin: We took a nice long walk.
Merlin: We took some photos and had a nice visit.
Merlin: And that was good.
Merlin: But this day feels so freaking weird to me.
Merlin: We just just, I mean, without going into too much detail, there's a lot going on right now.
Merlin: And everything feels weird right now.
Merlin: And like I just said on Twitter a minute ago, I have those same physical sensations that I used to get when I had a new crush on somebody where like my head is hot and my arms are heavy and I can't think.
Merlin: And then the thing with the sun and the changing time, you know, just kind of exacerbates that.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: How does your kid adjust to this?
Merlin: I remember struggling at the times when, you know, you got to get your kid to go to bed and, you know, you try and have like a, you know, what we used to call sleep hygiene.
Merlin: And usually it's when we switch back the other way, it's so hard because it's still light out at bedtime.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like what, how does your kid adjust to the time change?
John: Well, because there's not, um, she has weirdly always wanted to get up earlier than she does.
John: Like she's, she's always kind of chastising us.
John: Will you wake me up at seven?
John: And we bought her an alarm clock and
John: And it unfortunately, we made the wrong we went the wrong direction on the choice of child's alarm clock because you can go like alarm clock that works or you can go kids alarm clock, which is fun.
John: And we chose, she's just at that age.
Merlin: It's the wrong time.
Merlin: Don't get cute about time.
Merlin: I mean, I know you're a little cute about time, but this is your opportunity for a fresh start.
Merlin: Don't have your kid be cute about time.
John: The problem at nine and a half, as you probably remember, is you're right on that, you're right...
John: at the tipping point where it's like, you could still get cute things.
John: You could, you can still entertain her with cute things.
John: Like it's a phone and it's shaped like an elephant, but she's also like old enough that she needs things that work and needs things that, you know, she wants things that work.
John: So we got her a, uh,
John: When I say we, I do not mean me.
John: It was purchased for her.
John: Oh, I'm familiar with the passive voice.
Merlin: Believe me.
Merlin: It was determined that an item would be added to our house without any intervention from me.
Merlin: And I found out once it was already in the house.
John: And this is a clock that's also like a glowing ball that throbs with different colors.
John: And if you hit it a certain way, it does one thing.
John: And it's like a socket, bop it kind of clock thing.
John: And I'm like, you know what she needs?
John: She needs like a schoolroom clock on the opposite wall.
John: And she needs a wind-up clock with two bells.
John: Yeah.
John: Because she's living in 1935.
John: But she has this clock that's like an orb.
John: And it's like a conjuring orb.
John: Oh, that's nice.
John: Yeah.
John: But 45 minutes were spent.
John: Like going through LCD menus on this thing, trying to figure out what, you know, like no manual, just like how does the alarm work?
John: And then it worked once.
John: Hasn't worked since.
John: A second alarm clock has not been purchased.
John: You know what?
John: During the show here, I'm just going to go and I'm going to buy it.
John: I'm going to go on eBay, and I'm going to buy a clock that was used by the U.S.
John: Navy in the 40s.
Merlin: That's a good idea.
Merlin: Maybe it runs on Steam.
Merlin: They have to get up on time.
Merlin: 100%.
Merlin: Otherwise, they don't Navy.
Merlin: I know this is maybe not quite in your wheelhouse.
Merlin: This might be more in your daughter's mother's wheelhouse, but you could get a little – it's called an Echo –
Merlin: Spot, I think it's called.
Merlin: That's what I have.
Merlin: And it has the benefit of all the kinds of things where you benefit from having an Amazon device.
Merlin: Plus, that gives you the opportunity to not have to diddle and whittle with all the knobs and gizmos and gizmacs.
Merlin: You could do it from your telephone and do the programming of that.
John: What keeps her from ordering 50 copies of Old Town Road?
Yeah.
Merlin: You mean the remix?
John: Every mix.
Merlin: Guess what?
Merlin: It arrived.
Merlin: What arrived?
Merlin: You'll see.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Going to get refunds on the old town road.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: That's a really good point.
Merlin: I think you can, I imagine you can, I know there's things you can do.
Merlin: So we have several of these sorts of devices and you can do things like say, turn on the do not disturb, do not allow this to do these kinds of things.
Merlin: There's a little bit of protection there, but yeah,
Merlin: I'm with you, man.
Merlin: We've tried this.
Merlin: Back when we were doing, as we say, the sleep hygiene, we got a throbbing orb.
Merlin: We tried all the different things.
Merlin: And it's like my digital race car watch from 1978.
Merlin: You know, it's like you've got one button and another button.
Merlin: You go through modes.
Merlin: And John, why is the print on everything so small now?
Merlin: I realize that my eyesight is poor, but I can't read.
Merlin: I have to get all the lights all the way bright and my glasses in the right place.
Merlin: I can't read anything.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: You don't just get a manual anymore, really.
John: You need to have a magnifying glass on top of a stack of books, Marlon.
John: That's just where you're at now.
John: Magnifying glass on top of a stack of books.
Merlin: Yeah, I should be able to anticipate that.
Merlin: You know what's cool is my wife pointed me to this website where they make, I think it might be called Schoolhouse Clocks or something.
Merlin: Yes, hello.
John: I know the company.
Merlin: Oh my God, they're so cool.
Merlin: I like almost all of them very much.
John: Yeah, they're good.
John: And they're from schoolhouses.
John: I was just thinking about finding an old school, like a set of cabinets from an old school art class and trying to repurpose them in my house.
John: And I went searching for them and realized that what I thought they were was they had primary colors.
John: I mean, I always think of them as primary color.
John: But what they really are is mauve.
John: And it's like 80 shades of mauve.
John: Oh, I love that movie.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I would have always called it mauve, except the people around me call it mauve.
Merlin: Oh, you just got to give up.
John: You just got to give up.
John: Right?
John: Do you hear me?
John: I'm saying mauve.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: And this is why I have to say aunt.
Merlin: I say aunt's like a fucking caveman now, because apparently that's what they say in New England.
Merlin: So do you say mauve or mauve?
Merlin: I want to say mauve.
Merlin: You do.
Merlin: You always do.
Merlin: I avoid it because I don't precisely understand the color and I'm not going to look it up.
Merlin: It's a kind of grayish pink kind of.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: Just as I said it, as I said 65 shades of mauve or whatever, I realized I have no idea what mauve is.
John: Also, I think I know what mauve is, which is kind of like a purple or eggplant.
John: Oh.
John: But I don't know what mauve is.
Merlin: We also got the Fauves, which was the French painting movement.
Merlin: It's all very confusing.
Merlin: Is puce green?
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
Merlin: You're killing me.
Merlin: I don't know any of these.
Merlin: I know gray and I know blue.
Merlin: Right.
John: Those are the colors of the Civil War.
Merlin: How interesting.
Merlin: But also, you know, you get around certain kinds of people and you go, hey, you know, go get that thing.
Merlin: And they go, which thing?
Merlin: You say, get the pink one.
Merlin: They say, no, do you mean the salmon one or the shrimp one?
Merlin: And I'm like, what world are you living in?
Merlin: I can't tell navy from black.
John: You know, it's nice.
John: Being friends with Mike Squires is nice because Mike is very colorblind.
John: Oh, nice.
John: And so he only really sees...
John: I don't know what greens.
John: Maybe he, there is a color he can see.
John: Maybe he probably sees like bright and sleep.
John: Well, he's always, so he, that's why he partly why he, I mean, one reason he dresses all in black is that he's very metal, but one reason is that he can't see colors and he's in, and I,
John: Like if I couldn't see colors, I would just wear the most Harlequin plaids, kind of like I do now.
Merlin: Oh, are you kidding me, man?
Merlin: I'd be matching up.
Merlin: I'd be Glenn plaid, match that with a herringbone or, you know, like you say, like a jester outfit.
Merlin: I'd be having so much fun with it because it only harms others.
Merlin: It's like not bathing.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: It doesn't affect me.
John: Throw some patterns at other people's eyes.
John: But Mike, I guess, colorblind for many years, he at some point along the way got self-conscious probably as a teenager about things not made.
John: And so he just buys things that he knows are going to match, which are typically like navy blue or black or somewhere in between.
Merlin: I ended up there because I buy all of these podcast t-shirts.
Merlin: And at some point, everything I own became –
Merlin: Basically, I have been approaching, it's kind of like a Ray Kurzweil thing, a gray goo, because all I've got is like heather gray things.
Merlin: I used to have black things.
Merlin: I used to have white things.
Merlin: And increasingly, it's what Nate Silver calls reversion to the mean.
Merlin: All I see now is gray.
Merlin: And my question for you, John, is didn't Mike Squire serve?
John: Yeah, he was in the United States Marine Corps, that's right.
Merlin: You're telling me, so United States Marine Corps, here's what I know.
Merlin: I know they're like the hardest beds and the coldest chow.
Merlin: I know the first to go last.
Merlin: First in, last out.
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Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Anyway, go ahead.
Merlin: High altitude, low offerings.
Merlin: There you go.
Merlin: That's airborne.
Merlin: And airborne is the stuff you take that doesn't help your cold.
Merlin: My question is, though, I know you have to also, well, I say high school graduate, I believe.
Merlin: Now, with that said, you're telling me you can go and become a United States Marine with colorblindness issues, or did they just not test that?
Yeah.
Merlin: Was he such a good candidate?
Merlin: They said, you know what, private squires, we're going to overlook it because we need you storming the castle.
John: Here's the funny thing.
John: When it comes to soldiering, colorblindness in certain applications is an advantage because it defeats camouflage.
John: The devil, you say.
Merlin: You say camouflage is a trick.
Merlin: It's a razzle-dazzle as clothes.
John: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Oh, I did not know that.
John: So with colorblindness, you look through the camouflage and you see motion and shape that other people are bamboozled by the colored pants.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: It's like why Ray Charles always stayed at a Holiday Inn.
Merlin: Totally makes sense now.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Well, and it really served Mike in the typing pool at Camp Pendleton.
John: Okay.
John: Because, you know, things would come across his desk and they'd be like, this is code pink.
John: This is code, you know, green.
John: And he'd be like, I can't tell the difference.
John: I'm just, I started at the top of the pile.
Merlin: Which one is goldenrod is the question.
John: Which one is Goldenrod?
Merlin: That's so interesting to me.
Merlin: Mike Squire's military nervous condition clocks.
John: The election.
Merlin: Oh, hi.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Welcome.
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Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: Jeez Louise.
Merlin: I got eight minutes there.
Merlin: Eight minutes of freedom.
Merlin: I'm sure it's going to be fine.
John: That's what I've been saying for four years.
John: So what do you think tomorrow is going to look like for you?
Merlin: That Joe Biden will be a very, very clear winner almost everywhere electorally and that the election will possibly be stolen away from him.
John: No, no.
John: I mean, just personally for you, are you going to wake up in the morning and start looking at your phone and just look at it without stopping all day?
John: Or are you going to practice some internet hygiene and try and make some pancakes, try and live a normal life, go for a dawn walk maybe?
John: How does it look to you?
Merlin: Yeah, okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I like this angle.
Merlin: Let me put it this way.
Merlin: There's a word I like to use sometimes, and some people have found this word useful.
Merlin: That word is wholesome.
Merlin: It's not that something is good or that something is bad or something is whatever.
Merlin: The question becomes, is this a wholesome thing to do?
Merlin: It's got whole grain goodness.
Merlin: It's got ancient brains and seven weed bread tube.
Merlin: Real butter.
Merlin: I, okay, here's a for instance, is that as, this is so boring.
Merlin: I hope your daughter listens to this someday.
Merlin: I know mine won't.
Merlin: Right now, at least I checked a minute ago, there's a case being heard in Texas about whether they're going to throw out 127,000 votes that were.
Merlin: I thought that they determined they were not going to throw those out.
Merlin: I don't want to say anything.
Merlin: The last time that I checked, the dude who was in on the hilarious conference call said that it's looking like it had been, as we started recording, it had been looking like the judge was very sympathetic to allowing the votes that were already cast.
Merlin: The only question then becomes like, are we going to allow it tomorrow?
Merlin: But for an interesting reason, which, as I said a few minutes ago, and who knows what's going to change.
Merlin: Given that, if there is some problem with the votes being rejected, the judge is asking, well, do we want to still offer that tomorrow without people knowing that that could, you know, be problematic on the day?
Merlin: And, you know, which I think is a very interesting POV.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But wholesome, John, wholesome.
Merlin: And I'm trying to get better.
Merlin: This has been a study of mine for a while.
Merlin: And like I say, I like wholesome because it does have a certain valence to it.
Merlin: But, you know, when we talk about our attention and our time, the question becomes, like, are we feeding nutritional wholesome things for our attention?
That's right.
John: Are you eating the right food pyramid?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Am I shotgunning information in a way that is wholesome?
Merlin: I'm just here to tell you, how do I know these things are happening?
Merlin: Because, you know, things are not going great when I have opened the app called TweetDeck.
Merlin: Uh-oh, tweet deck.
Merlin: You know, which the extremely online people use, I don't use it because it's not wholesome.
Merlin: Except for a day like today, I got fucking five columns rolling in real time, bringing in the stuff, and I go, this is not wholesome.
Merlin: So the reason I say this is a good question, in part, is because I need to check myself before I wreck myself as regards wholesomeness.
John: So do you ever...
John: When you've got enough election stuff going on and you just can't – you cannot read another thing because you've read it all and everything is just a rephrase or a different website saying the same thing.
John: Do you ever pivot over to COVID stuff and just do a nice deep dive in like what's going on in COVID right now?
Merlin: Elections are my morning problem and COVID is my afternoon problem.
Merlin: Afternoons are reserved for the death count because that's partly, you know, that's when Johns Hopkins puts their stuff out.
Merlin: That's when the COVID project puts their stuff out.
Merlin: That's when I pop in and see that a hundred thousand people are getting sick every day.
Merlin: Oh, isn't that something?
Merlin: Um, but question.
Merlin: So no, actually we did talk about this.
Merlin: I rescheduled.
Merlin: There in the back question.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: First time caller.
Merlin: Um, my lady friend and I talked about this actually.
Merlin: Um, I was supposed to have recorded a podcast, uh, Tuesday evening and we rescheduled that.
Merlin: Um,
Merlin: Um, and so I'll have some clear runway for watching the carnage, but I don't know.
Merlin: I'm, I'm, I'm with you though, because they call it, you know, the kids today, the youth, they call it doom scrolling.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Doom scrolling.
Merlin: I've heard that term.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And that's where like, there's so much pain that you've brought upon yourself and you keep going, fluka, fluka, fluka, fluka, waiting for a new, waiting for a new pebble of a new pellet of pain to drop into your little cage.
Merlin: Pain pellet.
Merlin: Pain pellet.
John: Last year, or no, last year, four years ago.
John: Same thing.
John: Four years ago, when our forefathers brought forth onto this continent a new nation.
Merlin: Yeah, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
John: I, you know, I was dating Millennium Girlfriend at the time, and I had a concert on election night.
John: And as you recall...
John: We were all very confident in the outcome, but I was especially confident in it because I had a lot invested in how a democratic administration was going to, you know, really like bring it home and how, how my gal Hills was going to, um, you know, I just really felt, I just felt very strongly about how, how things were supposed to be.
John: And so
John: or how they were going to be.
Merlin: And so all indications were pointing that way, unless you actually looked at the County, you know, level stuff, but yeah, but who wants to look at that?
Merlin: A hundred percent.
Merlin: We're going to sail right through this.
Merlin: That guy, what?
Merlin: No.
John: And it was a show I was doing with a couple of friends.
John: Shelby Earle, the great songwriter, and I helped her produce her first record, and Eric Anderson of the band Cataldo.
John: We were all playing together at an old church in Fremont, and it was going to be... And we were backstage all together, and Millennium Girlfriend was there.
John: She'd flown up from California.
John: Backstage, we're just shucking and jiving, giggles and having fun.
John: And, uh, we're, we're checking our phones and it was that, it was that moment where it was like, Hillary has 91% chance of winning.
John: Well, now she has a 75% chance.
John: Actually given this latest information, you know, her chance is only 60% now.
John: And at that point when we were, we were like, what's going on?
John: Yeah.
John: We had to take the stage.
John: Oh, Jesus.
John: And we took the stage and I said, look, we, I said to everybody in the room, like, we need to put our phones away.
John: We need to not be checking on the, the election.
John: We need to just be here.
Merlin: Before you went on stage, you got a little bit of the fear that something.
John: There was just a little.
John: Yeah.
John: There was just a little something happening where it was like, you said what now?
John: Right.
John: What is happening?
John: But we had everybody turn their phones off.
John: Leave it.
John: Leave it.
John: And so the whole room, the whole audience and the show, there was this pregnancy because everybody felt a sense of looming disaster.
John: But we were in this little bubble for the space of whatever, two hours that the show took.
John: And then we walked off stage to the, to the bad news.
John: Yeah.
John: And it, you know, it feels kind of like the Joko cruise this year where I was on a cruise while the pandemic was raging across the country.
Merlin: Literally a day after you guys, what are they called?
Merlin: Cast off.
Merlin: Literally a day after you guys, less than 24 hours after y'all left was when they first said, okay, we're done with cruises for a while.
Merlin: You were like, you were hanging onto the pontoon of the helicopter.
Merlin: We were.
Yeah.
John: But this year, I don't have any built-in reason to not pay attention tomorrow.
John: I'm not on a cruise.
John: I don't have a show.
John: All I have to do tomorrow is wake up and start looking at my phone.
John: And that would be bad wholesomeness, bad internet hygiene.
John: And I don't know what else to do.
John: I don't know what to choose to do to distract myself.
John: You know, my co-host of my Friendly Fire podcast, Ben Harrison, is actually going to be a poll watcher somewhere because he's a dedicated.
John: It is a little dirty.
John: He's going to be a poll watcher in Las Vegas.
John: He's there watching poll.
John: I bet that's a term of art there.
John: Yeah, for sure.
John: He's going to get there with his little red, white, and blue top hat and say, like, I'm here for poll watching.
Merlin: And they're like, right this way, sir.
Merlin: Go through the beaded curtain.
Merlin: Ooh, democracy.
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Merlin: our thanks to mac weldon for supporting roderick on the line and all the great shows can i tell you you know it's funny i i um i don't know because you know my kid just had a birthday and uh we were talking about there's that thing you talk about it's a silly sounding term but it's an interesting thing that birth story like a a woman um being able to share with people like what their little like the end of that journey of being pregnant was and can i tell you my my election day did i ever tell you my 2016 story
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: I'll make it quick, but it was an incredibly memorable day.
Merlin: Well, first of all, just in terms of an opening statement, I mean, I think there's something that's so important to understand in the human psyche and our emotional makeup, which is that...
Merlin: You know, there's something along the lines of the pleasure and pain principle, which is like, this thing reminds me of a bad thing where I felt bad.
Merlin: And I will bend over backwards to never feel that feeling again, which doesn't always turn out so great.
Merlin: But you know that.
Merlin: You know that.
Merlin: I mean, you don't run away from pain.
Merlin: Why don't I fall in love?
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: Eight times bitten, once shot.
Merlin: But, you know, I bring you my birth story because I know, as I'm telling you these things, that I like to think that I'm a rational person.
Merlin: I'd like to be tall.
Merlin: But I would love to be a rational person, but like anybody, I'm superstitious.
Merlin: And I'm trying to think about all these different things about how that day went and what it –
Merlin: portended.
John: Oh, are you going to, are you trying not to like, uh, walk the same route to the coffee shop or something?
Merlin: Well, I'll tell you this, we're not going to get Hawaiian food and you'll find out why in a minute.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Do do do crack of crack of Tuesday.
Merlin: We get up and the three of us walk to our polling location with our, uh, my wife and my ballots.
Merlin: And I said, uh, I said to my daughter, I would be honored if you would place my ballot and
Merlin: into the box for our first female president.
Merlin: Oh, how sweet.
Merlin: And I thought, oh, come on, who's gonna break my heart now?
Merlin: Come on, no, what?
Merlin: Easy sailing.
Merlin: Oh, that's lovely.
Merlin: Then guess what, John, what do you know about me?
Merlin: You know that I am jury crack.
Merlin: They really want me on every jury.
Merlin: I'm always being juried.
Merlin: And actually, you know, knock on everything.
Merlin: I haven't been juried in quite a while, but guess, so then I go downtown.
Merlin: I think if memory serves, my wife actually dropped me off at the Hall of Justice, which is a terrific name.
Merlin: And I went in and so very, very long story short, I, I somehow, you know me, I'm going into ridiculous panic attacks because I don't know if I ever told you the story, but the jury duty that I appeared for on election day of 2016 was an assault case with two people that was expected to start very soon and go into January or possibly February of 2017.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Have you done a jury that was that long?
John: Have you been on juries that were months?
Merlin: Not that long.
Merlin: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: I mean, the times that I've been seated, you know, there's been like three times I've actually been seated and many times not.
Merlin: Um, but the main thing they know about the story is I'm instantly going into ridiculous panic attack and they're saying, you know, is there any like overriding reason?
Merlin: And then like everything, you know, we're always like 10 to 30 years behind the way the world actually is.
Merlin: So I would have to like explain how,
Merlin: Oh, you know, I do podcasts.
Merlin: It's like an internet radio show when I work for myself.
Merlin: And I'm panicking.
Merlin: I'm filling out this form.
Merlin: And to cut this part of the story a little bit short, I did the thing.
Merlin: I did the thing.
Merlin: I hit the eject button, which is I said...
Merlin: Is there anybody here that might have reason?
Merlin: And I say, I would like to speak with the judge.
John: This is in person?
John: You did this in person?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Because a lot of people are like, oh, you know, I'm a bucket salesman and I have to work in my bucket.
Merlin: Oh, well, bucket salesman, that's very important.
Merlin: Finally, I pulled the record and I said, can I please speak privately with the judge?
Merlin: Take me back.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: And I say, your honor, I'm aware of a concept called jury nullification.
Merlin: Have you seen this done before?
John: Who are you modeling here?
Merlin: Oh, no, this is a thing.
Merlin: So jury nullification, the notion is, and this is definitely a thing, which is that the jury has the right, in some form or fashion, people on the jury have the right to utterly reject something based on, it's a long story, but essentially jury nullification, you're going to be real careful how you talk about this.
Merlin: And this is why I did it privately.
Merlin: If I stood up and said, I might nullify the jury, they might throw me in the clink because this is the third rail.
Merlin: This is what Wall Street and those fat cats don't want you to know.
Merlin: Is that the, you could go through a case for two years and at the end it falls apart because one of the jury people says, no, for moral reasons, like I wouldn't be able to do that.
Merlin: I think this is a, you know, a morally.
Merlin: And so I said, I'm not saying, I'm not saying I would do that, but like, that's a thing that's top of my mind about this.
Merlin: I've read a lot about it.
Merlin: And they're like, so are you telling me you would not be able to determine this fairly to set aside your, I said, well, it's not a question of that, your honor.
Merlin: It's not a question of that.
Merlin: I certainly, I could do my best to set it aside, but you know, jury nullified.
Merlin: vacation and i might as well held up a crucifix made of garlic and silver bullets and they're like all right you know so so so what you were what you were pretending to be was a person with some complicated ethical uh reason that they couldn't sit in judgment of someone else like who were you i was not faking or fronting um about that because i do think that these two african-american youths that had been charged in this case uh
Merlin: They seemed a little bit shafted to me.
Merlin: We'd have to determine that later.
Merlin: But I can also tell you, based on my very first jury experience, I had the wind utterly knocked out of me by how shitty, not just my experience, but the case that I was, I'll tell you about another time.
Merlin: But yeah, basically, long story short, I was back in Tallahassee, a case where a kid who was a bully picked a fight with this kid that he'd been bullying, and the kid hulked out, bit off part of the bully's ear.
Merlin: The bully sued the Board of Education for Leon County, Florida, saying that he was improperly monitored.
Merlin: because he got in school early.
Merlin: And so here's what the case came down to after hours and hours and hours.
Merlin: This is back in the 90s.
Merlin: What it came down to in the end, the judge said, the judge said, I am telling you, there's exactly one thing you are permitted to rule on here.
Merlin: Was the policy of the school board and the school properly followed on the day that this ding-a-ling got his ear bitten off?
Merlin: You're not allowed to decide anything else.
Merlin: And I was like, fuck.
John: Really?
John: You can't decide whether this kid deserved it.
John: You can't decide justice.
John: You can only decide this matter of law.
Merlin: Your Honor, Marbury versus Madison.
Merlin: The kid had it coming.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Whatever.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: And so he read us the jury instructions for 20 minutes.
Merlin: We went back and said, I know what we're going to do.
Merlin: We're going to find that they didn't, but we're going to award $1 like we've seen in movies.
Merlin: Yeah, that's a good one.
Merlin: We came out and we said, oh, yeah, Your Honor, yeah, rule on this.
Merlin: I'm referring here to the case in the 90s that killed my interest in how juries operate.
Merlin: We said that.
Merlin: The judge goes, hmm.
Merlin: Plaintiff's attorney stands up and goes, your honor, I rule deedly deedly D. The judge says, I agree, whatever his codicil was.
Merlin: And the judge said, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm going to read you the jury instructions again.
Merlin: 20 minutes of that.
Merlin: We were basically forced to say the bully should get money because he got part of his ear bitten off for being an asshole.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: That really set me, put me off my beer.
Merlin: I'm sorry I'm rambling.
Merlin: I'm such a goddamn mess.
Merlin: So anyway, long story short, so I get out of jury duty, right?
Merlin: So guess what?
Merlin: Hall of Justice, you know where this is roughly.
Merlin: And guess what I walk up?
Merlin: 6th Street.
Merlin: I'm walking up 6th Street on Election Day.
Merlin: Do you have a sense of 6th Street?
Merlin: I feel like you probably do.
Merlin: I do, yes.
Merlin: 6th Street is...
Merlin: pretty rough in like not in a like you're going to be menaced way but in a like godspeed you black emperor way there will be you know amputees crying and shitting on needles and like i'm walking up and i'm like whoo because i gotta get to muni to get home i'm relieved i don't have jury duty but i gotta get home i'm gonna cut this short and
Merlin: And it was just like, there was like, man, this feels bad.
Merlin: God, Sixth Street sucks.
Merlin: I feel so, this is so terrible.
Merlin: And I got on Muni.
Merlin: I went home.
Merlin: Finally, election night comes along.
Merlin: We're all ready.
Merlin: We're going to see the coronation of the queen.
Merlin: We're all very excited.
Merlin: And things are looking pretty, pretty good for a while.
Merlin: Now, my family at this juncture, because this is the kind of thing we used to do because we're suckers, they're going to go to the Poke Bowl place and get Poke Bowls because – I don't know if you've encountered this.
Merlin: Please go buy stuff at Chipotle because it supports the school.
Merlin: It's school night at Chipotle or whatever.
John: Oh, no, no.
John: I missed that.
John: Although, Chipotle is a big part of the –
John: The thing around here, but we never connected it to the schools.
Merlin: My wife and my kid get in the automobile and they drive to the poke place.
Merlin: And pretty much before they're even like out of the driveway, it's like, oh, huh.
Merlin: Some of these results rolling in are a little bit uncomfortable.
Merlin: All I'm here to tell you is by the time that they got back, I was like, were y'all listening to NPR in the car?
Merlin: And I'm like, no.
Merlin: And I was like, well, it's really super not looking good.
John: Oh, so they had a little, that last minute patchouli dream state.
Yeah.
Merlin: They had a patchouli dream skate.
Merlin: They got their burrito.
Merlin: They're out of it.
Merlin: They're out of that liminal space.
Merlin: They don't know what's going on.
Merlin: They're like the lady on the flight talking about AIDS in South Africa.
Merlin: She doesn't know from landing at that point.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Like your performance, I have an experience with dipping, dipping out for a little while, and then you come back and it's like not what you expected in crucial Waukesha County.
Merlin: I don't want to feel that feeling again.
John: Now, what are you going to do?
John: Merlin, what are you going to do then?
John: I mean, how do you, you want to just, you're going to, you're going to get on that surfboard at dawn and ride it all day until.
John: I don't think that's awesome, John.
Merlin: What do you think I should do?
Merlin: Be honest.
Merlin: You know me.
Merlin: You know I'm a nervous wreck in the best of cases.
Merlin: As you said, the first day we met, I should get a T-shirt that says governed by fear.
Merlin: What is it that you think?
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Merlin: What would your advice be to a young man like me about having a wholesome relationship November 3rd, 2020?
Merlin: What should I do?
John: Well, I think that I think that the, you know, the first thing that we all need to understand is that that 80% of the potential outcomes are
John: are going to result in the president, the current sitting president, doing the same thing, which is declaring that he's the victor, right?
John: 80% of the outcomes, even if there's only a 10% chance he's the victor, 80% of them, he's going to declare that he's the victor.
Merlin: That is the stated strategy of his campaign, yes.
John: Yeah, we almost know that for certain.
John: But the crazy thing to remember is that there's over two months between election day and when the president is seated.
John: That's two plus months, including Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's.
Merlin: You think I haven't thought of this?
Merlin: They're going to be stripping the White House down to the joists.
Merlin: Jared Kushner's going to be out there selling portraits of Lincoln in front of the White House.
Merlin: They're going to pardon literally everyone.
Merlin: It's going to be insane.
John: Michael Keaton's going to be locked in the front room of the White House.
John: He's going to be introducing rats and roaches into the ducts.
John: No, no, you remember that movie.
John: It takes place in San Francisco.
John: The one where he's like the tenant from hell that won't leave, and he strips all the copper pipes out of the... It's like a horror movie, but only if you're a property owner.
John: And it came out in the 80s.
Merlin: I don't even remember why I saw it, but it's haunted me to this day.
Merlin: I remember Night Shift and Batman...
Merlin: And hardly working with Jerry Lewis.
Merlin: I remember his TV show.
Merlin: Oh, and I remember 220, 221.
Merlin: I got to look that up.
John: So it's called, um, well, hang on.
John: I can, I can find it here.
John: Pacific Heights.
John: It's got Melanie Griffith.
John: It's got Matthew Modine.
Merlin: I have no, uh, 1990.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: That's one of those years that he was still making his piece with his hair.
Merlin: Look at that.
John: Yeah.
John: 1990.
John: And it was, it's, it's, uh, it's something you don't see anymore.
John: A psychological horror film.
Merlin: Oh my gosh, like the game or something.
John: Yeah, there's no murder in it.
John: There's no ghosts.
John: It's just like, what would it be like to rent out a spare room in your house if you were a young couple and you rented it out to a bad person?
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: It's one of those like a Glenn Close thriller.
Merlin: This movie could only have been made in this year.
Merlin: It's got Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It's just, it couldn't be any other year but 1990.
John: And it's kind of analogous to what happened in the White House.
John: We rented it out to a really bad guy.
John: So we know that there's going to be 70 days of chaos.
John: And we know that there's probably going to be, you know, like, there's so much that's going to happen.
John: So unlike four years ago,
John: Election day is not going to be the end.
John: It's only going to be the beginning, the beginning of months of the country, just in a typhoon of, of insanity.
John: And so really tomorrow is just like, you just need to, but you need to buckle in.
John: I mean, obviously the results tomorrow are important and the, whatever the small, the fractional chance that it's like a massive landslide,
John: There's no, there's no denying it.
John: He'll still deny it, but like,
John: Otherwise, I feel like we're going to learn so much about the Constitution, about the prosecutor's office in New York State.
John: I think we're going to learn a lot about America.
John: We're going to learn a lot about ourselves.
Merlin: Cy Vance is a name I remember from the Carter administration.
Merlin: That was his dad.
Merlin: Yeah, and I think we're going to be hearing a lot from Cyrus Vance Jr.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There's a great article.
Merlin: Everybody's been talking about for a while, but not to talk about politics, but everybody's been talking about this for a while, which is that because of the OLC memo from the 70s, I believe, the policy of the Justice Department is you don't prosecute a sitting president for anything wrong.
Merlin: federal um but you know he's got there's a lot of people tapping their foot right now including deutsche bank including including cy vance including all these different people there's going to be a lot of gentleman callers appearing as soon as he's out of office which is all the more reason why apart from not wanting to look like as he says a loser why he's fighting so goddamn hard
John: If Deutsche Bank goes under for all of this, I wouldn't shed a single tear like those.
John: Oh, no, a pox on both your banks.
John: Absolutely.
John: Yes.
John: But I do feel like I'm like fastening my seatbelts for what is going to be.
John: I mean, this is a ride that we're all on that we can't do anything about now.
John: Like you and I can't do anything about it.
John: We're about to go on it.
John: It's going to be a heck of a ride.
John: And I just hope that my only hope for tomorrow is that the, the much smaller fractional chance that, that it's a clear and unequivocal victory for the sitting president.
John: Like that's the only outcome tomorrow that is just like a
John: Full nightmare scenario.
John: I agree.
John: I agree.
John: Anything else in the middle there where it's like, oh, you know, disputed votes in the Supreme Court and all that stuff.
John: It's going to be just one because there there actually are checks and balances.
John: I'm not defending them.
John: I'm not saying any of them are good, but there are like four or five things that have to happen between now and January for.
John: For the, well, for the, any one of 50 totally bonkers typhoon outcomes.
John: Yeah.
John: I'm really in, I'm in it to win it here.
John: And, um, so yeah, tomorrow, as far as my personal hygiene goes.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Give me the temperature for how you're feeling.
Merlin: I mean, you've kind of said this, but let's come out with it.
Merlin: As you sit here today at 1146 a.m.
Merlin: Pacific time on Monday, November 2nd, what's your temperature right now?
Merlin: What's your feeling?
Merlin: What are you feeling?
John: I was so wrong last time.
John: that I feel very shy about having confidence in my feelings.
John: I think that the incredible turnout of voters is a super good sign, but I think that the Republican ground game that they've been playing since the Reagan administration, where they've packed all of the local elections boards,
John: And all of the county sheriff's offices and, you know, like there are all these people in Pennsylvania who are there to determine whether ballots are counted or not that are full on QAnon believers.
John: And so it's the ground game thing that's scary.
John: And I think we're all scared and we've known about it for decades.
John: three decades now that that through gerrymandering try and win every um nfc championship by murdering the refs it's right like it's the school board problem where it's like hey well in this particular county in pennsylvania they took any reference to geology out of their textbooks and
John: Because it never – the word never appears in the Bible.
John: And the rest of us in the world – Which was written in English.
John: The rest of the world is just like, oh, well, okay.
John: I guess that's ha, ha, ha.
John: Too bad for those hicks in Pennsylvania.
John: But now, like the whole fate hangs in the balance.
John: And it's happened a couple of times to us.
John: And we just haven't done –
John: We're just not used to playing the ground game.
John: It's just not how liberals think.
Merlin: Yeah, it's unseemly for the way that we would like to think of ourselves.
Merlin: We don't want to play these bare-knuckle tactics against people.
Merlin: No.
John: We want to win on the strength of our argument and on the strength of the truth, which is clearly not how the right thinks.
John: So I'm nervous.
John: I'm nervous about all of that ground game stuff.
John: But I feel like unlike in 2000 and 2016, the left, and by that I extended pretty deeply now into the establishment left.
John: The establishment left, both in 2000 and 2016, really let us down.
John: because they were the ones that said, well, the rules say, and, you know, you have to respect the... And they were the ones that, you know, Al Gore conceded rather than appeal.
John: You know, there were all these things that men of honor did.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, like a lot of people saying, you know, by any... I'm just parroting something I heard on a podcast the other day, but by the standards of any other... And forgive me if I'm stealing your bit...
Merlin: uh podcasters but you know by the standards of any modern contemporary western society what we call the left is actually much more centrist and then on top of that there's another distinction between being like liberal versus being uh these are centrist institutionalists so one reason al gore did that right was because he wanted to like restore peace to the galaxy yeah right and and and you know the the idea that um
John: That there's a left, a center and a center right and a center left.
John: And I mean, all of that is that those notions come from parliamentary cultures where the distinction between center right and center left matters.
John: And in the United States, we don't think that way.
John: You know, it's, there's just a line down the middle and it's like, do you fall here?
John: Do you fall there?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Because Democrats are lawful neutral.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And, and, and it used to be that most Republicans were, you know, the,
John: that most Republicans stayed out of your bedroom.
John: That whole business is post Reagan too.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Post moral majority and like, right.
Merlin: But like, yes, stuff that used to be like a, just a value that we were different from one another was then kind of meant to be like shoehorned in or shoveled in as like, this needs to be ape law now.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
John: If you think about Eisenhower, he didn't want prayer in schools.
John: You know, like Eisenhower was a sensible, a sensible man.
John: And Gerald Ford probably was too.
John: He sent the, he sent the National Guard into Little Rock, didn't he?
Merlin: Eisenhower?
Merlin: Was it Eisenhower that did that?
Merlin: I mean, this is in the days before Kennedy and, you know, civil rights bill and all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: But obviously Eisenhower is not a perfect man, but he is much closer in his alignment to what we would think of as a centrist, kind of left-leaning by today's standards, probably.
John: I guess Eisenhower sent the
John: The National Guard into Little Rock.
John: You're absolutely right.
John: And I don't know how I didn't have that story foregrounded in my mind.
John: But, you know, Eisenhower was the one that, well, famously, right, coined military industrial complex.
John: On his way out, yeah.
John: There were so many Republicans right up until, well, throughout my life that you felt like were just, all they wanted was lower taxes.
John: And the rest of it, you could do what you wanted, right?
John: They wanted less regulation.
John: They didn't want no regulation.
Right.
Merlin: When my dad was – it's so funny now for me to say that in the late 60s, my father was very involved with the NRA and with a bunch of hunting groups.
Merlin: But that's when the NRA was about teaching you how to be safe with a gun.
Merlin: And it was about conservation so that you could hunt ducks in the future too.
John: Yeah, you got to save the ducks so you can kill them later.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Farmers don't hate cows.
John: They just monetize cows.
John: I think one thing that has happened in the last four years, and I think –
John: Like Bernard, former presidential candidate Bernard, pushed us this direction a lot.
John: His campaign and his supporters, but also just the shock and awe of our experience of the last four years as a country, has made a lot of establishment Democrats.
John: It's brought a lot of them, if not into what you would call a leftist camp,
John: then into a much more combative mentality.
John: And I think this whole business of the courts and the ground game and the electoral college and the sitting Congress, all this stuff is going to be played with a lot more hardball this time.
John: I sure hope so.
John: I sure hope so.
John: for most of my adult life, which is, you know, to say like, well, you know, we do, we want the library of Congress funded.
John: So it's like, no, no, no, no.
John: This is, I, everybody recognizes what we recognize, which is like, do you want, do you want the war to start now?
John: Or do you want the war to start
John: at some point in the very near future, right?
John: Like you don't, you don't sit by, you don't sit idly by now.
Merlin: You gotta go to the mattresses, man.
Merlin: You know?
John: You do.
John: Cause he's not going to get, he's not going to get better.
Merlin: No, but like there's so many, um, I'm sorry to, to, to break the rules here and quote Monty Python, but there's a wonderful scene, uh, that everybody will remember from the Holy Grail.
Merlin: And for some reason, I just think of this all, every time Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi get out there and go, Hey, you're not allowed to break norms.
Merlin: I always think of this one scene when, um,
Merlin: Remember when one of the knights, I think the Michael Palin character, thinks that it's a princess that's being held in the castle.
Merlin: And of course, it's the son who wants to sing.
Merlin: And you see him.
Merlin: We see him from far away.
Merlin: And then he's still far away.
Merlin: And then suddenly the joke is that he's already there and he's just running into the castle.
Merlin: And one of the guards turns to him and goes, hey.
Merlin: I think about that all the time.
Merlin: When Nancy Pelosi, God love her, says she has many arrows in her quiver to help with the Supreme Court stuff, and then we never see the quiver, let alone the arrows.
Merlin: I just think of that guard going, hey.
Merlin: There's a flower.
Merlin: Flowers has arrows.
Merlin: Like, hey.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like, come on, you're a guard.
Merlin: Like, your whole job, according to the motherfucking Constitution, is, like, you have a job to do.
Merlin: Do the guarding.
Merlin: Do the guarding.
Merlin: I think of this one, like, so we recently went through a thing where, not too recently, but during COVID times, we watched the wonderful series Veronica Mars a couple times.
Merlin: I had never seen it, but boy, it's really good.
Merlin: But, you know, there's a thing that happens.
Merlin: And, you know, in your family, you get bits.
Merlin: And one of the bits in our family is, like, in pretty much every episode, something happens.
Merlin: Veronica puts a listening device in somebody's office.
Merlin: She does something.
Merlin: And every time my daughter would go, hey, that's illegal.
Merlin: I'd say, yes, Veronica Mars is committing many federal crimes.
Merlin: And then the next episode, you do it again and again and again.
Merlin: And as much as my daughter could watch that and say, that's illegal, it never stopped Veronica Mars, probably because it's an old show and Veronica couldn't hear her.
Merlin: But that's what we're talking about in some ways here, right?
Merlin: It's like saying, oh, you can't break norms.
Merlin: You can't do illegal things.
Merlin: Well, you know what?
Merlin: If you've got all of those judges in a position, into the positions they are, like you've been doing what you just described, this very long theory,
Merlin: or this long game of ginning up all the resources and dungeon masters to be on your side.
Merlin: Well, they're going to be the ones who decide whether it's a legal buddy.
Merlin: And if Congress doesn't want to chase you down and reluctantly goes, okay, fine, we'll impeach, but we don't like it because norms.
Merlin: It's like, dude, you're bringing nothing to a gunfight.
John: We're in a very unique, not unique.
John: We're in a very interesting situation, which the world has been in before.
John: countries, nations have been in this situation before, which is that we have seen all our norms destroyed.
John: We need to exploit the fact that there are no norms right now.
John: and do things potentially.
John: I mean, I don't know tomorrow.
John: It might, there might be some massive landslide where Trump just gets on a plane and goes to, goes to a non expedition country.
John: Yeah.
John: Just like goes to Angola and then Pence is president for two months.
John: Uh, while, you know, while the world switches over, but even then we have to accomplish our goals and
John: and make an unravel problems, you know, that, um,
John: Like restructure things, right?
John: We have to eliminate the electoral college.
John: We have to pack the Supreme Court.
Merlin: Lifetime justices on the Supreme Court.
John: Right.
John: We have to change the way the Congress works.
John: We have to do all these massive systemic overhauls.
John: But with the goal of reestablishing like a new baseline of norms –
John: And hopefully make the new norms better.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Stop assuming that people will do the right thing.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like, this is what was so confusing.
Merlin: Don't apply to the president because we've never had to sweat that quite so much before.
John: Isn't that crazy?
John: I mean, all these things that it was just like gentleman's agreement.
John: Don't be an asshole.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, you don't have to.
Merlin: It's crazy.
Merlin: He's like such a perfect, to use his word, hydrasonic missile.
Merlin: That's not what the word is.
Merlin: But anyway, he's a perfect weapon for exploiting the kind of loophole, I guess, that we never anticipated, which is what if a narcissistic theoretical billionaire got into office?
Merlin: And he's literally the only person in federal government who does not have to hew to these laws about not having businesses and doing disclosures and all those different kinds of things.
Merlin: He's constantly reminding us, well, I don't actually have to do that.
Merlin: et cetera.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Like, let's put that in the code, dude.
John: But, but what's, I think the, I think, and this is where, you know, this is where a lot of more militant people roll their eyes at me because I am someone who does not feel like the thing to do right now is to destroy Western civilizations.
John: Right.
John: Like I still am somebody who believes that the constitution is a living document and that it has, and that within our system, there are the powers to restore a new balance.
John: And I think that things should be rewritten.
John: I think this is a great opportunity, but, but I also don't believe that,
John: it that that we should play their game right because if you play their game yes then they get back in and then they play their game and then the whole game is their pig and all people see is pigs so we we have to rebuild we have to redesign but we have to do it with the end goal of establishing stable norms and that's so hard and i really do feel like there are many more people now that
John: are on this more sort of radical, many more establishment people that have a, a more, much more radical view.
John: They're probably not on the barricades right now.
John: You know, they're still establishment people and they have mainstream jobs, but they're mainstream political jobs, but I think they're ready and have studied, you know, these are the ones that also know the code.
John: Um, so I'm,
John: this was what was so disappointing about the Obama, uh, years was that they were all very smart.
John: They all understood the code and they really were invested in maintaining the status quo.
John: Absolutely.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, and, and so when Obama got elected, we all had that feeling of like, well, shit, we're going to rewrite the book and it didn't get rewritten.
John: Um,
John: And, you know, Obama's a lovely man and I wish he were president now.
Merlin: A lot of lost opportunities.
John: And I don't feel like Biden and the Biden administration are going to have that same problem.
John: And partly it's that they – that we're all cauterized by it, by the missed opportunity.
John: And honestly, I mean, Biden, as old as he is, he's a different man.
John: He's a different guy.
Merlin: Absolutely.
John: So I'm hopeful.
John: But you know me, Merlin.
John: I'm a political optimist.
John: Yes.
John: And I cannot.
Merlin: You believe in the American experiment, and that's what I love about you.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: There's also, I mean, I, gosh, I don't even know where to begin.
Merlin: You know, there's that phrase I learned, you know, five or six years ago, accelerationism, which is this kind of like, it's our own kind of like left-wing black pill where it's like, oh yeah, this is going to get so much worse and we're finally going to have the revolution.
Merlin: Well, I'm here to tell you, man, accelerationism is a young white man's game.
Merlin: That accelerationism is not going to be terrific for anybody but you.
Merlin: And, like, if your job is, like, your assistant manager at the Best Buy and you really want the, hey, man, bring the system down, it's like, okay, but I do think there's a needle that can be threaded.
Merlin: And I would look to the junior congresswoman from New York.
Merlin: You can have a very assertive and aggressive agenda today.
Merlin: That doesn't require being an asshole.
Merlin: And you can be charming.
Merlin: And you can be funny.
Merlin: And you can do all of the things that make you effective at your job without saying, well, like, you know, I'm Johnny Hippie Pants and I'm here to burn the place down.
Merlin: I do think there's a needle that can be threaded.
Merlin: It's not easy.
Merlin: And most people are not up to it.
Merlin: Computer programmers don't get into it because they love people.
Merlin: And I think politicians don't necessarily get into it because people join a school board because they care.
Merlin: I don't know if you make it through five, six, seven, eight elections moving up a ladder without being a somewhat cynical person.
Merlin: I do think there's a needle that can be threaded that the Great American Experiment is still very much possible without either burning things down or capitulating to all of our worse angels.
John: Yeah, the only problem with people that are excited about a revolution is I've still yet to hear any of them describe a platform of what they're going to replace the status quo with other than
John: A platform based on like don't worry about it.
John: We'll figure it out.
John: You know, don't worry about it like Once the bad people are out Then good will rush in and that kind of program has worked great in Central America Oh, it's so well.
Merlin: It's so great.
John: It's work.
John: It's worked throughout history.
Merlin: It always works Revolutionaries make fantastic administrators for a country of 300 million people.
John: That's gonna work out great for a lot of people Yeah, if you're gonna do better than what we have
John: Then you should be able to present that as a well-described like a white paper of like, here's, here's what would be better and not a piecemeal one because a piecemeal one is working with what we have.
John: You go in and you eliminate the electoral college.
John: You go in and you do this.
John: You go in and you do that.
John: You, you, you make modifications using the infrastructure, using the machines that we have in place.
John: If you want to eliminate all of those and destroy capitalism, show me how it pencils out and convince me.
John: Because I'm here to be convinced.
John: I'm a fucking socialist in every respect.
John: But I have not seen the Democratic Socialist Party present me with a platform that suggests that I would choose it.
John: So that's the problem with the revolution is just like, which revolution?
Merlin: It's like choosing your college professors based on who lets you have class outside.
Merlin: Like, I'm not really sure that should be your top metric.
Merlin: And I'm also going to pull this together with a thread from that we've been talking about since February or March.
Merlin: What have we been saying all along?
Merlin: Maybe it's time.
Merlin: Maybe COVID is making us realize that it's time to move some furniture around in terms of how we decide to live our life.
Merlin: This has become very important to me, John.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And not just because I don't like going to things, but also just because like, who's this is, there's, there's a new, a new level of fecundity and softness to what could happen if we do it right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So there's, there's that, but like, it's, this also kind of applies now with politics.
Merlin: Like this is a good time to move some furniture around.
John: Yes, it is.
John: And it's, I mean, it,
John: And again, now I'm excited, right?
John: And I think tomorrow's results are going to be good.
John: And I think that in January, we're going to have a peaceful transition of power.
John: And I think in the middle, there are going to be a lot of rednecks outside of friendlies in Arkansas who are causing problems.
John: And I think there are going to be some people that get hurt.
Merlin: Oh, the open carry pork chop man will be showing up.
John: But all of that, right?
John: There's no question that between now and Inauguration Day, people are going to get hurt.
John: And I don't relish it.
John: I wish it weren't true.
Merlin: Can you imagine what's going to happen in Michigan tomorrow?
Merlin: Can you even fucking imagine?
John: It's terrible.
John: It's terrible.
John: And the thing is, I remember in 1991, during the run-up to Clinton's election...
John: Um, feeling like the mood on the streets among me and all of my contemporaries, the young generation X after, after eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush senior, the mood on the streets was very revolutionary.
John: It felt like we cannot stand for another four years of this.
John: And it was, there was so much
John: energy that no one ever talks about.
John: And maybe it's because it was confined to a youthful generation that was small.
John: So we didn't have all the airwaves that young people do now.
Merlin: It's also like Boomer has taken on this meaning that I think has gotten a little bit silly.
Merlin: But you have to remember, if memory serves, Clinton was the first person in since Eisenhower who had not served in World War II.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He was the first boomer president.
Merlin: Now, I know who I'm stealing this from, which is the Blank to Check podcast, but we were talking about this yesterday with Forrest Gump.
Merlin: But it's so easy to forget the climate that made people love Forrest Gump and not see it as a satire.
Merlin: It was the same generation that said, oh, my God, President's saxophone is going to change everything.
Merlin: He's got to be cool.
John: And that's what happened, right?
John: Clinton got elected, and all of the revolutionary energy that was in the run-up to that election just kind of dissipated.
John: And it was the energy that was powering what became grunge.
John: It was the energy that was powering all of us to have that whole cynical attitude.
John: And Clinton got elected, and if you'll notice, like,
John: the, the blood ran out of the Seattle music scene, the blood ran out of the youth culture and didn't really come back.
John: Like it had, you know, think about, think about the underground in 1988, the, you know, what we thought of the cultural underground, the underground in 1990.
John: And by 1994, uh,
John: the underground, what was the fucking underground?
John: I was there.
Merlin: It was one dog-eared copy of Research Magazine and Hillary Clinton's attempt to print out a card for healthcare.
Merlin: Remember that?
Merlin: That was one of the very first things was people were so mad because, first of all, Hillary was involved at all, but also then they got so...
Merlin: Well, but they got so bogged down in that healthcare thing.
Merlin: It was so misguided.
Merlin: They did not have the votes that they needed, not the support that they needed.
Merlin: And the first big thing, and not so, well, it is different, but in the same way that we learned everything we needed to know about Trump when the very first week of his presidency, it was all about his crowd size at the inauguration.
Merlin: And that became a touchstone for the rest of his administration.
Merlin: And those mainstream centrist failings of the early days of the Clinton administration,
Merlin: you know, he, now he's like, he's like the opposite of Eisenhower in the sense that like today, I mean, in some ways he is much closer to a center right person in some ways in retrospect.
John: But Clinton had, Clinton had that, uh, he had, he had boomer arrogance.
John: He just had boomer arrogance in his forties instead of, you know, boomer arrogance now in their late sixties.
John: But like he was, he just thought that they could sweep in and because they, because they went to Ivy league schools, like they were going to, it was going to be easy for them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
John: But what I think is going to happen in this period between election day and inauguration day is that it's going to be a terrible time.
John: But that when the inauguration happens, it's going to actually bring –
John: Peace back because I don't think the boogaloos and the white supremacists, the proud boys, they don't have anything behind them.
John: They're, they're bags of hot air and that what they keep hoping, what they think they're doing and what they think they are is they think they're a vanguard of a national movement to, to make a white homeland and,
John: And they're not.
Merlin: We've always had weirdos and nuts in this country, John.
Merlin: It's just now they're wearing flowered shirts and they're ruining that for us, too.
John: Yeah, and they're young people and they've got Macklemore haircuts and they think that they're badass.
John: But what they're going to see is they're going to rise up for sure.
John: Right.
John: And and December, November and December are going to suck.
John: Yep.
John: But because they have something to actively aggressively fight.
John: Yeah.
John: They're going to be driving around in their trucks and farming people's yards and whatever else, you know, whatever.
Merlin: They're going to be donuts with the flags on their truck.
John: They're going to be toilet papering the White House or whatever.
Merlin: But when there's a new administration.
John: I'm drinking this paint thinner in your name, Mr. Trump, sir.
John: Like, they don't have any support in the actual, like, fat middle of America.
Merlin: Absolutely not.
Merlin: The folks who are happy to, uh, cynically, very, I think there's a lot of Lindsey Graham's in this world, et cetera, Mitch McConnell's, who have an agenda, and they are more than happy to accept the support of these ding-a-lings, but I don't think they are going to step up in the way that the president has to, like,
Merlin: defend them or to welcome them.
Merlin: I think especially with whatever happens next, you know, God, I hope we're both not wrong about this, but don't you think, I mean, it's just, it's a bunch of, it's a bunch of fucking edgelords.
Merlin: Like that guy who shot the people in Wisconsin, they arrested him and he cried and he barfed and he was so sad because he'd shot those people and he was going to be in big trouble.
Merlin: He's in Dutch now with the, with the, with the man.
Merlin: And it's like, you know, these guys are not fucking Navy SEALs.
John: No, edgelord is exactly the word.
Merlin: Yeah, they're just fucking, like, overstimulated onanists.
Merlin: I'm like, that's not the basis for a political cause that's going to have any kind of, God, I hate these words I'm saying.
Merlin: Jesus Christ.
John: I've talked a lot about, in the early 90s, the white supremacist movements that were happening up here in Washington.
John: Right.
John: And, you know...
John: And in Northern Idaho.
John: The Metzgerers and all of them, right?
John: Yeah, all those people, right?
John: The Hayden Lake.
John: And that was very... It was very present in the punk rock scene because there's always been that problem in America and I guess worldwide of like skinheads, racist skinheads, non-racist skinheads.
John: Like skinhead is always...
John: skinhead and ska uh are and where that overlaps hardcore hey everybody take care of yourself take care of yourself i hope we're here next week we love you people yeah me too me too we'll be fine people i mean no
Merlin: We won't be fine.
Merlin: I'm proud to be an American.
John: It's going to suck.
John: People are going to get hurt.
John: Keep your heads down.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Happy Tuesday.