Ep. 459: "Ukrainian Prank Calls"
John: hello hi john oh hi merlin how's it going oh fine how are you going i'm great i'm great i'm great you know i'm always doing projects
John: I do know that.
John: What are you working on?
John: Oh, boy.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Big projects right now.
Merlin: I've returned to my energy project, trying to get my energy straightened out.
Merlin: I'm also spending a lot of time with bins and bin systems.
Merlin: I'm doing a lot of binning.
Merlin: I'm going to take my MacBook Pro that bricked to the Apple store today.
Merlin: There's all of that, you know.
Merlin: But, you know, I complain, but who'd listen?
Merlin: Actually, things are going fine.
Yeah.
John: I'm here to listen.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, you know, you've moved in life.
Yes.
Merlin: A phenomenon, I can't put an exact year on this, but certainly by the time I was moving five times a year in college, but before that, there's this funny Zeno's paradox to moving.
John: Can you explain Zeno's paradox just real quick?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: One is the one that, like, how can an arrow be in this place and not in this place in motion?
Merlin: But the famous one is if you stand, let's say, one giant-sized footstep from a wall, and then you take a half a step toward the wall, you're now much closer than you were before.
Merlin: Correct.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: And I know this is not for you.
Merlin: This is for the listeners because you're a learned man of the liberal arts.
Merlin: You participated in the history of ideas.
Merlin: I was a participant.
Merlin: And they say, okay, that's good.
Merlin: I'm almost done.
Merlin: I'm almost at wall.
Merlin: Yeah, sure, you're halfway there.
Merlin: You take another half step toward the wall, and you're certainly closer.
John: You're halfway there.
Merlin: You know how this story ends.
Merlin: It's infinite recursion or something.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: It's turtles all the way down.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: Turtles are standing on elephants, you know?
Merlin: But I found that to be true in moving, where, like, you know, I think, especially if you're getting some help, whether that's from your friends or professionals, like, oh, we've moved the bed.
Merlin: We've moved the couch.
Merlin: That's all out.
Merlin: And, like, you're...
Merlin: The first giant half step toward the wall title is that all the big stuff is gone.
Merlin: And you're like, Hey, I'm just about done here.
Merlin: But boy, are you never not done?
Merlin: Cause then your next half step could be stuff like, Oh, get the books off the shelves.
Merlin: That's not that hard.
Merlin: Good tip here.
Merlin: that I learned in one of my moves was, um, I don't know if you can still do this time was you go to liquor stores and get the liquor, uh, uh, boxes and a liquor box.
Merlin: Whoa.
Merlin: Oh, liquor box.
John: Okay.
Merlin: You poke her in the front, liquor in the rear.
Merlin: And you, uh, I once knew a man that had that on a shirt, paid to have it on a shirt, but you, um, but your next big half step, what they say is they say, uh, you know, the problem is people put too many heavy books in big boxes.
Merlin: That's no good.
Merlin: A liquor, uh,
Merlin: A liquor box-sized box.
Merlin: I'm not judging, and I'm certainly not being ableist.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I just want people to be happy.
Merlin: That's a good-sized box.
Merlin: Now, why am I saying all this?
Merlin: Who knows?
Merlin: But the steps towards the wall, eventually, though, you're getting into, like, oh, then there's the kitchen.
Merlin: In the kitchen, you got to deal with all the stuff in the drawers, and that's got to go somewhere.
Merlin: And eventually, you feel like you're losing your goddamn mind because you keep taking half steps toward the wall.
John: Well, now, wait.
John: Will liquor boxes work in the kitchen, too?
No.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
Merlin: I mean, I think one benefit of and one reason my bin system is so intoxicating is that I've gone from putting tons of crap in what I will call a big box to putting little bits of well-organized things into a small box or bin.
Merlin: So if I have a big banker's box in my case, first of all, having boxes that are the same size of whatever it is you're binning is useful for purposes like stacking on a moving truck or whatever.
Merlin: What I'm trying to say is I am finally, I'm so reluctant to use this phrase because it's so abused and I have been so hectic about browbeating people who use it incorrectly, but I'm actually getting organized.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Uh-oh.
Merlin: And that involves a lot of half steps where it feels like you're getting closer to the wall, but you're really just taking smaller and smaller steps.
Merlin: Not that that's bad, but it's one thing to say, like, so the equivalent of that, you know, in terms of, like, you think about how you move a house, you move the bed and the big stuff, the bureau, all that stuff.
Merlin: Well, that's like getting garbage out of your place.
Merlin: Garbage, you can mostly tell is garbage.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And then at the way, way, way at the other end of that, when you're done with a million half steps, you've got all of your certain like quarter inch mounts, your hot shoes, all the things that you need.
Merlin: I think I'm turning into a Van Halen song.
Merlin: Ah!
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John: Hot shoes!
Merlin: In a little bin box.
Merlin: But, you know, the thing is, the in-between part is also where there's difficulty.
Merlin: Because the in-between part is where you have to realize, and forgive me for, again, quoting myself, you should never organize anything that should actually be discarded.
Merlin: If you're just moving stuff to a nicer box, you're not getting organized.
Merlin: you are inhabiting a personality disorder.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So that's what I've been doing for the last few weeks is... Ooh, cool.
Merlin: Cool.
Merlin: Oh, remind me to talk to you about crows.
Merlin: I'm going to write this down.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I have some crow observations I want to share.
Merlin: I keep forgetting to tell you.
Merlin: Anyway, and it's great.
Merlin: It's great.
Merlin: So I'm really in on this.
Merlin: I'm really gay bones for this company, Aiken Mills.
Merlin: If you've ever seen one of those little plastic bins, they're stackable.
John: I've seen those.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I noticed one in the TV series, The Dropout.
Merlin: when they're faking their Theranos tests.
Merlin: But those bins, you can get them in all different sizes.
Merlin: You can get racks.
Merlin: So you can stack them or you can hang them off the wall.
Merlin: You can rack them, you can stack them, you can hang them off the wall.
Merlin: It's exactly right.
Merlin: Crispy, crunchy nougat.
Merlin: You do it all.
What are they called?
Merlin: And so that's been great.
Merlin: What's their name?
John: Let me look them up.
John: I want to look at them.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Search for, it's A-K-I-N, A-K-I-N space Mills.
Merlin: And they have a pretty good website.
Merlin: Akin, I think it's Mills with.
John: I like looking at boxes, as you know.
Merlin: Oh, dude.
John: This stuff.
John: Wait, the first one that comes up is Rebecca Akin at Mills College.
Merlin: Oh, I see that.
Merlin: Maybe it's L with.
John: Akin Mills is a software program.
John: That's a great name for a programmer.
Merlin: Try, so try Acro Mills, A-K-R-O.
Merlin: Dash Mills.
Merlin: They really could make this easier to find.
John: Acro Mills.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Oh, no, I went Akiro Mills, and now I've got a bunch of motorcycles.
Merlin: Oh, but these things are great, and I won't get into the whole thing because I have a whole Velt and Chong that I'm working on right now.
Merlin: But it's really, it's turning out to be really good.
Merlin: And the irony of the bin system versus the boxes of crap system is that it becomes very obvious very quickly what it is that you have that's not where it should be.
Merlin: So you can use these little bins.
Merlin: Like in my case, I've got one bin right here that's just cables that don't belong where they are.
Merlin: I've got another, I have a box called adhesion, John.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: So how many of these bins are like cables that don't belong where they are, where they're liminal bins, where it's a bin that's part of a process?
Merlin: I'm so glad you asked me that.
Merlin: And you're going to be so sorry that you asked me that.
Merlin: So like right behind me, I have a little rack, just a little bit off the floor.
Merlin: I could put in my big bins.
Merlin: I could put in my little bins throughout the day.
Merlin: This gives me this Kanban like ability to sweep a bunch of stuff into a bin.
Merlin: And then before I go home,
Merlin: I repatriate things to where they actually belong.
Merlin: Dry erase markers go here.
Merlin: Ethernet cables go there.
Merlin: Any of that stuff, because otherwise it makes a pile and a pile becomes an affliction.
John: Are the bins... I know the answer already, but I'm going to ask it.
John: How is color coding factoring?
John: Right now, not at all.
John: Oh, okay.
John: So yellow bins aren't bins to go to a certain place, whereas blue bins go to a different place?
Merlin: No, that's a really good point.
Merlin: I learned about these from my friend Alex.
Merlin: And when they were the tech...
Merlin: wrangling czar at their previous job they learned about these wonderful bins and like it became this way of like you could actually say to people like on the phone oh if you need a new charging cable for your macbook pro like find out which one it is which one you have and then go into the supply closet and in the bin labeled xyz you can grab one of those and just sign it out
Merlin: So the color coding is good, but the problem is for a fellow like me, who's still taking baby steps with actually literally getting organized, I like the saminess of the bins being just the same color.
John: What color have you chosen?
Merlin: Mostly clear or black.
Merlin: I like clear, yeah.
Merlin: Clear is definitely the best, in my opinion.
Merlin: Now, here's what's neat about that.
Merlin: And so, look, I had a real good pal.
Merlin: Hi, Chris.
Merlin: Chris Colger.
Merlin: Good pal of mine.
Merlin: One of my most influential friends in college.
Merlin: Hi, Chris.
Merlin: Hi, Chris.
Merlin: He used to take on personal experiments.
Merlin: And he was very inspirational to me in his personal experiments.
Merlin: And one time, he decided he'd stayed and got a job on campus.
Merlin: You get a free room, and then you just paint all day.
Merlin: Like one of those pretty mellow summer jobs.
Merlin: But you get a free room.
Merlin: And he said, I want everything I own to be visible.
Merlin: Wait, you mean you paint like for the school, like you paint walls?
Merlin: Yes, you go through all the pay dorms.
Merlin: And every room at New College in the pay dorms is identical, 15 by 15.
Merlin: And anyway, you go and you paint those.
Merlin: But anyway, Chris says, I want to be able to stand in the middle of this dorm room, you know, and I want to be able to turn around 360.
Merlin: And I don't want anything I own to not be visible.
Merlin: Wow, so no box under the bed.
Merlin: No, but this is... Nothing in a drawer?
Merlin: Well, but, like, so... Well, here's the thing.
Merlin: Like, so many of the things that inspire me, it's got two parts.
Merlin: Because, like, the first part is, oh, that's kind of cool.
Merlin: Like, in my case, I got really addicted to hooks, which, you know...
Merlin: people like wives love.
Merlin: But my clothes were on hooks.
Merlin: All of my shirts were on hooks.
Merlin: I could see all of my shirts.
Merlin: I was inspired by Chris.
Merlin: So part one is, yeah, you're organized.
Merlin: But part B, that I think is the really invigorating part is, oh yeah, for this to work, you need to get rid of a lot of shit.
Merlin: You're not allowed to have a personal library vault of stuff that's in a box, under a box, under a box, under a box.
Merlin: And if I do that with all of my mounting stuff for cameras and microphones and that kind of stuff, which I end up using a lot more than a normal person would, having those all in bins that I can just kind of look at, I don't have to open a lid, it's all there.
Merlin: But see, this is the glorious cycle, John.
Merlin: is that I use the bins for collecting junk that needs to go somewhere else.
Merlin: I use the bins for provisionally sort of organizing roughly.
Merlin: But at any point, I can throw everything out of the bin, put it into two smaller bins, one bigger bin, whatever it is.
Merlin: It sounds mental, but I really, I'm very attracted to this idea of, I can see, it's very satisfying visually and from an organizational standpoint.
Merlin: Did you have any questions at this point?
John: Yeah, what do you do with things that you might need to,
Merlin: One day or things that like a power brick or like, you're not sure, like you're not sure what this thing is for, but it feels important.
John: Yeah.
John: Like if you get rid of this, you're going to go looking for it, but you're not sure what it is exactly.
John: Or one day you might need this, but not today or any time in recent memory.
John: Right.
John: Or did this fall off of something?
John: I feel like it did.
John: And if I throw it away, then I'm going to have a thing that has only three and needs the fourth one.
John: I know.
Merlin: Like casters or wheels or anything like that.
Merlin: Again, mounting is a big part of my life.
Merlin: I have a lot of mounting in my life with my liquor boxes.
Merlin: First, you go to the liquor box, and then you're allowed to mount.
Merlin: But what do you do with that?
Merlin: Well, there's a couple ways to do it.
Merlin: One way to do it is a trick I learned about, I want to say, from Martha Stewart magazine.
Merlin: 15 years ago.
Merlin: Did you subscribe or was it a thing you got in an airport?
Merlin: Sometimes my lady friend used to enjoy magazines.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: She's kind of off it now.
Merlin: But what I learned, and I've taught my kids this, if you've got a bunch of stuff, this is the real kind of like...
Merlin: high level stuff not high level but you know low level i guess but if you got junk not in your case you've got cigar boxes full of valuable things but let's say you've got a box you haven't opened since college except when you're looking for something but you've never done anything with anything in that box you tape it up you could at the most basic level write a date six months in the future um you seal it up give yourself a reminder and if you haven't opened that box in six months you just throw it away
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: This is also what we do to clean out our junk drawers.
Merlin: The rule that I have instantiated in our house is like the really good drawer that has the good utensils in it in the kitchen.
Merlin: I don't like getting stabbed by corn cob holders.
Merlin: I don't like getting stabbed by just junk that somebody used once and threw in there.
Merlin: You empty the entire drawer into a box and nothing's allowed to live in that drawer again until you've used it twice.
Merlin: Whoa.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then after a month or three months or whatever, you look at that box and you go, okay, well, I guess we might have fondue someday.
Merlin: So I guess that has to go somewhere.
Merlin: So that one thing is, though, you do need to give yourself a fresh start.
Merlin: Just moving crap around doesn't help as much.
Merlin: Now, I think to the question that you're asking, I think power bricks are a good example of this.
Merlin: Power bricks or cables.
Merlin: Well, first of all, there's only so many USB mini cables that a person needs.
Merlin: It's one of those kinds of cables that comes with almost anything you buy and you end up accumulating.
Merlin: I don't need 60 of those.
Merlin: If I had five of those, it would be too many.
Merlin: But those, for example, go into a Ziploc bag that says USB-A to USB mini, right?
Merlin: Whoa, okay.
Merlin: Ziploc bags.
Merlin: And then I have one bankers box full of Ziploc bags.
Merlin: because I'm tight like that.
Merlin: But to your question, I think one thing you can have is, and again, you've given me so many opportunities to quote myself, the place where you store something should almost always be the first place you just looked for it.
Merlin: So if you can't find something, and to that point, if you can't find it on the reg, well, where's the first place you looked?
Merlin: Well, that's where your brain thinks it goes.
Merlin: So if it's at all permissible, especially if you're single and live alone,
Merlin: You can totally do this.
Merlin: And I think that kind of intuitive, like listening to your own brain solution is what you're looking for here.
Merlin: And specifically, though, like I've got one banker's box of stuff that I don't need right this second, but I know I'm going to need.
Merlin: And it's stuff that's mostly related to power.
Merlin: So if I found some loose, weird USB dingus for plugging a USB and turning it into a power cord, I don't need that right now.
Merlin: But I know if I ever do, I just go to the banker's box that has the power stuff in it.
John: Wow.
John: It's such a simple way of putting it that it should be where you first look for it.
Merlin: Because it feels like it should go where you arbitrarily decided a long time ago that it goes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I go through this.
Merlin: It's not just Madeline.
Merlin: It's me, too.
Merlin: If you put your phone down somewhere weird in the house, yeah, you can find it.
Merlin: You can have a beep and stuff like that.
Merlin: But ideally, you just don't put your phone down in weird places.
Merlin: Now, do you not put your phone down in weird places?
Merlin: Very rarely.
Merlin: I try not to put down anything valuable any place I wouldn't want it to be overnight.
Okay.
Merlin: But I mean, he's always going to bowl belt always goes here.
Merlin: Like there's certain kinds of things that I've, I've known since first grade.
Merlin: I've got to, I've got to try and help my, as Dave Grohl says, my, my poor brain, you know, I've got to have some compensatory muscles.
Merlin: Keys always go here.
Merlin: Do not touch my keys.
John: Keys go here.
John: I get that.
John: But like, sometimes I'll be walking down the hall looking at the phone and then I'll say, Hey, you've got 15 minutes to be somewhere.
John: And you need to do three things.
John: What you don't need is your friend the phone right now.
John: And so I will put it.
John: You definitely don't need that if you got 15 minutes.
John: No, you got 15 minutes.
John: You know, so time to go into a different mode, put your phone down and do the three things, right?
John: Tie your shoes, brush your teeth.
John: And I put the phone down in a place that's handy, that seems logical right there.
John: And then 10 minutes later, it's like, where did I put it?
John: And you don't do that.
Merlin: Do you do that?
Merlin: Well, I mean, if I'm being honest, I use my phone so much.
Merlin: It's almost always in my left pocket of my whatever pants I'm wearing.
Merlin: But what if you're naked when you say you've only got 15 minutes left?
Merlin: I don't think I've been naked since college.
Merlin: Oh, that's handy.
Merlin: No, I mean, you can get a bandolier like Chewbacca or whatnot.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: I mean, you got to do you.
Merlin: You got to do what makes sense.
Merlin: But I feel like I've watched people...
Merlin: observe people just really be up against it in terms of like, why can I never find this thing?
Merlin: And it's just, it sounds so, it's so intuitive that it's almost stupid.
Merlin: But like, let's say you can't find the spare garage remote because you lost, you've mislaid
Merlin: garage remote prime well where's the first place you look for it oh in that bowl like where the keys are okay well then that's where that should live unless unless somebody's got a better system unless you're chris cauldron and like you need to put everything on a hook but like you have to have some internal consistency and and john this is a one way that i do keep the demon dogs at bay to be honest yeah do you ever have trouble flying stuff well i'm somebody whose mind
John: Does look for it the place that he looks for it, and it's usually there, and it would be unfindable by anybody else.
John: I'll say, oh, I finally need that slide rule.
John: I haven't seen it in nine months, but I bet you it's under that jacket on the...
John: you know, next to the piano in the stack of books about old Chevy trucks.
John: And I go there and I lift up the jacket and there's the slide rule.
John: It's like the way your passport calls out to you.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's a kind of, it's a kind of,
Merlin: four dimensions that i just sort of know it's not that i it's not that i hear it calling i have a mode and my my my family can tell when i'm in the mode which is i have my arms like sort of from the shoulder to the elbows are straight against my sides and then my my from the elbow to the tips of my fingers they're kind of in front of me like i'm walking like a robot or a robot mode yeah
Merlin: Like a robot train?
Merlin: And I go, you know, and I do my incantations.
Merlin: Like, I got that, got that.
Merlin: Not there, not there.
Merlin: And I walk around.
Merlin: But I keep my heart open to the call of the passport, of whatever that thing is.
Merlin: And I think the arms might, in particular, be forming a rudimentary radar-receiving dish.
John: Yeah, they're an antenna.
John: Absolutely.
Merlin: Doesn't it seem like it's sometimes, if I do that, I'm more likely to find it?
John: When I say it's four dimensions, there's definitely a time component.
John: Because I will say...
John: you know, scan quadrant of six months ago.
Merlin: Almost like ad hoc archaeology.
John: Yeah, just like, okay, so anything that I have not, anything that I've touched in the last six months, it's not there because I would have seen it.
Merlin: And if you see stuff, you can pin to something even as obvious as a holiday or like, oh, that's back when I was doing this thing.
Merlin: And then you can go, okay, well, I know that that's too recent.
John: Yeah.
John: I was over in this corner and then I was, and what, how would it have been with those?
John: Oh, because I was using it to this.
John: And I, I generally can find those things.
John: The, the, like, I just put my phone down on top of a, of a, of a stack of books and then I moved a book on top of it.
John: Exactly.
John: That's, you know, like.
Merlin: You're way ahead of me.
Merlin: Cause the only thing I was going to say is your system will tend to work if you are consistent, whatever that means to you.
Merlin: The problem is roommates.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, housemates, family members, where if anybody could put... God, right now it's catalog season.
Merlin: We get so many catalogs.
Merlin: They're just like magazines.
John: They're as good as magazines, except you can buy things.
Merlin: Have you gotten a restoration hardware catalog recently?
John: I went to great lengths to run away from restoration hardware catalogs, and I think I finally...
Merlin: choked off the the uh between them and uline the the uh the the right wing office supply company i got i got away from them too oh boy that's a thick catalog but let's say somebody just we walk in you got groceries you got perishables you got to get the ice cream in the freezer you set some stuff down if that stuff got set down on
Merlin: And top of your, obviously your phone would be one, but, you know, your house keys, whatever it is.
Merlin: Well, now your whole house, to paraphrase David Allen, your whole house is an inbox now.
Merlin: Like you're going to have to go search your whole house because Restoration Hardware stole your eyeline to the keys.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I got a Patagonia catalog the other day, and I don't know why.
John: I've never ordered anything from Patagonia.
Merlin: That's mostly for people who work at Silicon Valley startups.
Merlin: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: Weirdly, it didn't sell anything.
John: It was an entire catalog, and it was just stories about people doing mountain things.
John: And I was like, at what point are you trying to sell me a magazine?
John: Yeah.
John: And it was, it was a magazine that looked like a catalog, not a catalog that looked like a magazine.
John: No, no, it was, it was a magazine that looked like a catalog looking like a magazine, but it was a magazine.
John: And, uh, and I actually read a couple of the articles.
Merlin: It's like, you know, when it says on the box of Stouffer's, you know, it says serving suggestion because it doesn't come with grandma's dish.
Merlin: It's kind of like that, except it's all serving suggestions all the way down.
Merlin: It's really about lifestyle.
Merlin: It's like REI, let's be honest, most of us.
Merlin: REI, not you, but me.
Merlin: REI or similar, maybe not REI, could be, oh, what's that weird clothing store?
John: Eastern Mountain Sports.
Merlin: There's that one place, especially ladies clothes and they sell sort of like urban outfitters where it's like, Oh, you're talking about what's it called?
John: Rejuvenation.
Merlin: Something like that.
Merlin: But it's like, we've got this kit bashed.
Merlin: Look, you can buy this $700 medical cabinet that you probably definitely need for your house.
Merlin: And it already looks a little bit beat up and maybe like it's been in a Benetton ad with, with a slender African woman or something like that.
Merlin: That's weird.
John: You don't lose stuff a lot, though, it sounds like.
John: Oh, but I mean, my problem is the other problem.
John: Like, I have...
John: Somewhere along the line, you know, I'm a fan of the Juno 106 Roland synthesizer from the early 80s.
John: I have a couple of them because I've come by them.
John: It's not the Dr. Dre one.
John: No, it's pre-Dr. Dre one, but it's like, you know, you might have seen the Dr. Dre.
John: In Prince and the Revolution, the doctor character.
John: Oh, the surgeon, yeah.
John: He might have had one.
John: Definitely Nick Rhodes had one.
John: Oh, that is a sexy synthesizer.
John: Yeah, it's very beautiful.
John: And I have a couple.
John: And to me, they're worth more than gold, right?
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: And this is definitely, I mean, this is probably analog, right?
Merlin: This is like pre-DX7.
John: It's pre DX seven.
John: It's a weird kind of in between analog and digital.
John: So there's pro pre-programmed sounds, but all of the controls are, are analog.
John: Okay.
John: Um, but I, at some point along the way, uh, came upon a outboard piece of kit, like a, like a little, it's a programmer thing, uh,
John: that you would have hooked up to the juno 106 it's like a sideboard yeah yeah it is and you know you hook it up through a 32 pin cable interface and at some point back in 1984 this would have been like a dynamite piece of sequencing kit that you playing live yeah you could record you could make loops or something with this additional piece of hardware
John: Now, all of that stuff that this piece of hardware does, you could do on your watch now.
John: It's non-essential kit, but it's super groovy.
John: And I have it in a box.
John: Now, the keyboard itself, I pull out all the time and play.
John: But the little thing, I'll never use.
John: I'll never use it.
John: Not a million years, and no one would because now you just play the Juno 106 into your computer, and then your computer... It's mostly a collector's curiosity for you.
John: It's a curiosity, but it's in a box, and it's not a small thing.
John: It's a large thing, and it has all of the 29-pin cabling that goes with it.
John: And so for the last 20-plus years, I have had this box...
John: And it's in a fine-shaped box.
John: It's not a liquor box, but it's a banker's box of its own.
John: And in it has gone a couple of drum machines that have associated power bricks.
John: Anyway, when you look at the box, there's a part of me that the 1984 in me...
John: looks in the box and goes, wow, this is like a box full of gold bricks.
John: And then anybody subsequent to 1993 looks in the box and goes, how is this stuff still in the world?
Merlin: Why do I still have an Atari 2600 and a whole shoebox full of games and this little weird ball controller?
Merlin: I've got the paddles.
Merlin: I've got the joysticks.
Merlin: I've got it all.
John: Do you have the adapter that could actually get it into a modern TV?
John: No.
John: Because it would daisy-chain, like, four adapters, right?
Merlin: Usually, if you use Time Ones, if memory serves, you'd hook it up to the antenna.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You usually get a switcher.
Merlin: But, like, I mean, I guess I could, but the truth is, if I wanted to play...
Merlin: Moon Patrol.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Which you do.
Merlin: Or Pitfall or something.
Merlin: There's a million ways you can, you can buy things probably at Best Buy that'll let you play that.
Merlin: There's something called MAME emulation where you can get the ROM for basically any video game that's ever existed and play it on a TV.
Merlin: Like, why do I keep all of that?
Merlin: It's because I can't bear to throw away.
Merlin: If I'm being honest, it's because I won an Atari 2600 so much when I was 14 and now I have one.
Yeah.
Merlin: And I'm 55 and it's in the garage.
Merlin: And sometimes I go and I look at it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But isn't it, is it kind of like that?
Merlin: It's a curiosity.
Merlin: It is.
Merlin: And I don't have anywhere to display it though.
Merlin: To me, something's not really a collection if it's not curated and put on display.
John: See now that, when I was looking for this house, this, this, this house that I'm living in, I had somewhat a vision that I was going to have a wall of shelves and on it,
John: I was going to have an Atari 2600 arranged artfully.
John: I was going to have my Apple, my Mac Classic 2.
John: But it was going to be on the shelf and Merlin.
John: Yeah.
John: It was going to be on.
John: Of course.
John: And the screen was going to be flickering with some kind of- Flying toasters.
John: Yeah.
John: Cool flying toasters.
John: Yes.
John: Yes.
John: And then- That would make me so happy, right?
John: Right.
John: And over here, I was going to have this little thing from the post-war and my 1952 radio was going to be on and playing jazz softly.
John: Yeah.
John: And walking into my house, you were going to be transported to the coolest place you'd ever been.
John: And I have those things.
John: I have my Mac Classic 2 in a box.
John: It has the original mouse and it's covered with Rainier beer stickers, but it's there.
John: And when I moved into the house, I looked around and I was like,
John: What about the shelves?
John: And they were going to have cowboy boots on them, and it was going to look like a catalog trying to look like a magazine.
John: Yes.
Merlin: It becomes like a personal, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's a little bit like a personal museum.
Merlin: A personal museum.
Merlin: It's got a wing.
Merlin: You're in the beep-boop-beep-boop cool tech wing.
John: Yeah.
John: Remember it's remember, remember that, remember this, remember.
John: Yeah.
John: And I, and I schlepped these boxes and these boxes go on top of boxes.
John: And I have a, you know, I have a copy of the, of German rolling stone where it was like, and you know, every single one of every time.
John: I have a thing.
John: I have a, I have a pin and it, and it goes in a box and then the box gets stacked on a box.
John: Yeah.
John: And I have found better boxes and I have gotten rid of so many things, but like every time I think, oh, now I'm cutting to the bone.
John: It's not anywhere close to the bone.
John: I haven't even started shaving my mustache.
John: Oh, dear.
John: Let alone cutting to the bone.
John: Yes.
John: And I'm looking at a wall right now.
John: Looking at a wall.
John: Here's the wall.
John: I have, there's a bunch of cigar boxes, I cannot lie, that are full of things.
John: There's a jug from an Ohio potting company from 18 whichever that
John: Oh, wow.
John: I've dug up in a hole.
John: There are a bunch of... Oh, I have a whole collection of metal I found on the streets.
John: See, there you go.
John: Do you have playing cards you've found on the streets?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I had a goal at one point of trying to create an entire deck
Merlin: from 52 different decks of cards how did you how did you fare how far did you get i don't know i don't know where they're probably in a box somewhere yeah yeah but i know exactly what you mean like i i it's a weird thing that i do but like if i see like a cool cool looking screw or a drain pipe or something or a lead lead sinker for fishing i just put a lead sinker in a few minutes ago
Merlin: It's a lead sinker.
Merlin: What are you doing to that?
John: Why are you putting garbage in bins?
John: I'm going to hook it to a spinner and I'm going to go fish for trout.
John: I used to carry around playing cards that I found on the street.
John: I found a playing card one time that I think had a bullet hole in it that I felt like I carried around as a good luck charm.
John: I never got anywhere close to putting together a deck, but
John: you know, I know for a fact in a box somewhere I've got, and they'd all been run over by cars.
Merlin: When you find a duplicate, like I used to collect chick publications and now my kid collects chick publications.
Merlin: It's like, Oh great.
Merlin: Another copy of high there.
Merlin: Like everybody's got 50 copies of high there because that's the one that weirdos buy in bulk to leave instead of a tip.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Hi there.
Merlin: Like there's something so depressing about finding a playing card that you already have.
Merlin: It's a bummer.
John: Oh, because you see it and you're like, oh!
Merlin: I already got the Queen of Hearts or whatever.
Merlin: You know, I found the Ace of Spades outside.
John: Somebody was probably killed right there.
John: I found it in Athens, Georgia.
John: Robert Duvall.
John: And I said, this is significant.
John: That feels important, John.
John: Yeah.
John: And boy, I carried it for a long time.
John: Like, no, no, no, that's the Ace of Spades from Athens, Georgia.
John: Like, that's...
John: Power lines have floaters.
John: Do you not understand what I'm saying right now?
John: And I carried it, and I think it's in a box, and I don't know where.
John: I don't know.
John: See, there you go.
John: How many mugs do I have that have lingo from the CB craze of the 1970s?
John: Three?
John: I do have three.
John: You're exactly right.
John: Well done.
Merlin: That's good.
Merlin: That's a good amount.
John: Yeah, that's exactly the right amount, except too many.
John: You have one for each of your friends.
John: You know, what you've hit on...
Merlin: is exactly what the russian army does not know oh spill it sister you know what i mean they don't know how to put things in boxes and put boxes on top of boxes and put boxes on top of boxes and everybody keeps going oh see this is they're just fooling you this is all they're gaslighting you to seem incompetent and you're like i don't know man that's that's a lot of shit going down to just pretend to seem incompetent what is that in service of i don't think they're pretending i don't either
John: Have you been doing that?
John: Have you been following the logistics nerds?
Merlin: Not as much as I had.
Merlin: I'm kind of off Ukraine because it was just making me... If I'm being honest, it was making me too sad.
Merlin: But no, but like, you know, we talked about the 40-mile single line of trucks that they couldn't keep fueled.
Merlin: But like, it's just that...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I've watched documentaries, but I don't know a lot about actually conducting a war, but like once you scratch anywhere beyond the surface of anybody who's like a, you know, an officer who's done war things, they all say the same thing.
Merlin: Like we, we might close this war out with weaponry, you know, men and machinery, but like, we're not going to get anywhere close to that without good supply lines.
Merlin: Um, and without a, without a plan, um,
Merlin: A plan with redundancies for keeping—well, that's food or boots.
Merlin: Again, look at the Nazis, man.
Merlin: Like, don't wear your summer uniform if you're marching into—trying to march to Moscow, you know?
Merlin: But yeah, no, tell me more, because I'm fascinated by this.
Merlin: It really does—I get the part about how Mr. Putin—nobody tells Mr. Putin bad news.
Merlin: What I don't get—
Merlin: Is the count currently nine generals that are dead?
Merlin: Yeah, I think, yeah, 10 stars, eight generals, maybe something like that.
Merlin: But like a lot of their, again, that's quite a subterfuge, but like it really, a lot of it really does seem to come down to a disconnect in how you would conduct even the war they thought would take a couple of weeks.
Merlin: That didn't work.
Merlin: And that was a month and a half ago, almost two months ago.
Merlin: Give me the dope.
Merlin: Give me some good anecdotes.
John: Well, I'm trying to learn from the war in Ukraine for my own and apply the lessons to my own life.
John: Lessons.
John: Because when I was young and I would meet a service person, someone who had served or was currently serving in the armed forces, of course I would say, what did you do?
John: What do you do?
John: And anybody that was like, oh, well, I work in supply, or I drive a truck, or I... There's way more Sergeant Zale, Sergeant Zale, than there are General's Patton.
John: Yeah, right.
John: But I had this, you know, because you're 20 or 15, I had this sort of, this idea that everyone was Sergeant Rock...
John: And that when I heard somebody was part of the supply chain or part of the administration, I was always disappointed.
John: Like, oh, that's too bad.
John: So what?
John: You were in Vietnam, but you never left Khe Sanh?
John: Or you never left whatever, the office?
John: And a little bit of that.
Merlin: You might have done a lot of work and never left Kansas.
Merlin: Never left Kansas.
Merlin: I just, what was that?
Merlin: Fort Leavenworth?
John: Leavenworth.
John: Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: But, you know, my dad flew supply planes in World War II, and I was always a little bit disappointed.
John: And I think maybe he was, too, because George Herbert Walker Bush flew a dive bomber and John F. Kennedy swam across the ocean.
John: pulling his PT 109 by his teeth.
John: Yeah.
John: And, and I always was like, so pretty good for a guy with absence.
John: He did.
John: He did really good.
John: Not to be ableist.
John: No, not at all.
John: But, uh, but you know, my, he is Irish though.
John: So he's Irish.
John: He was Irish or is he, is he, was he, Oh, my dad had his stories from the war.
John: He always found the stories that he told were always about the high adventure.
John: But really, his job was a job, a methodical job.
John: You know, you fly these things in, you drop them off, you come back, you get more things, you take them back out.
John: And as I've gotten older, I've gotten more and more interested in the logistics.
John: And when I went to Africa with my friend, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Martin, retired.
John: Matt Martin.
John: Lieutenant Colonel Matt Martin, retired.
John: Mike, Matt, Mark, they're all – it's just very confusing.
John: Pick a lane.
John: Matt Martin was very – he explained to me through the whole process that almost all officers in the military –
John: are engaged in a process of moving pallets of bottled water from this place to that place.
John: And over the course of their whole careers, you know, at first when they're a lieutenant, they're moving...
John: a pallet with, you know, 50 pallets with bottled water.
John: And by the time they're a major, they're moving 500,000 pallets of bottled water.
Merlin: Oh, you're responsible for more bottles and more pallets.
John: Yeah.
John: And you got to get the pallets from further away and you got to get them, you know, dispersed all these different places.
John: Not unvaluable work at all.
John: It's incredible.
John: As you're saying, you can't do the, you can't do the army without bottled water.
John: And he said, you know, the confusing part about it is that at a certain point, we expect these people who are really good at moving things around to make more complicated decisions.
John: And that's where, at least in the U.S.
Merlin: military... In terms of strategic in the way a civilian like me would think of it, in terms of deciding...
Merlin: How we should lead or respond in order to achieve a war-ish goal.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: I think it becomes a thing where it's very satisfying to get things done and check them off the list.
Merlin: Which is today a very strangely Silicon Valley problem.
Merlin: Just because you hired people who are good at making a battery doesn't mean you should own Twitter.
Right.
John: Right, and I think you see that a lot in business now.
John: You're absolutely right.
John: I mean, my lady friend is job searching right now.
Merlin: She's doing a lot of, like, project management stuff, right?
John: Well, and... Like, inside tech companies?
John: Yeah, she's in marketing, but in cybersecurity.
Merlin: And so, you know, they're always... Something in her job from a million years ago, I guess.
John: Yeah, right.
John: But they're always shipping...
John: products that are not products, right?
John: There's nothing tangible.
John: Are they shipping solutions, John?
John: They're shipping solutions.
John: And a lot of times it feels, and you and I have talked about this a lot, like modern business is the first idea was let's start a business and then the second idea was let's think of something that our business does.
John: Oh yeah, it's like a professional carpet bagger.
John: Seems like a little bit of a switcheroo.
John: But what Matt Martin kind of effectively explained to me was that
John: And the beauty of being in the army is that you have goals that are knowable and you can execute on those goals.
John: And then at the end, the goals are, then you have accomplished the goal.
John: And that's how you gain in rank.
John: And that's how it's very satisfying.
John: It makes you feel very accomplished.
John: You can do very complicated things.
John: But then at a certain point, you walk through the membrane and the goal becomes some statecraft or some global, you know, now you're interacting with people that have
John: tribal rivalries that are 700 years old, and all of a sudden you step out of this goal-oriented universe.
Merlin: Oh, and then you realize too late you brought a knife to a tribe fight.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: Not only is there no goal you can achieve, there are no goals here.
John: Yeah, there's no nails for you to hammer.
John: Yeah, everyone's laughing.
John: But what the war in Ukraine has pointed out is that all the logistics stuff that I used to laugh at about
John: about the American military, like, oh, what did you, you spent 15 years in the military and you just moved boxes?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Now, you realize that's what the Russians weren't doing.
John: They were not systematizing their box moving.
John: Right.
John: And their box stacking.
John: And now it seems like
John: That's the point of the spear, the sharp point of the spear.
Merlin: But also, like, it's worth mentioning something obvious here.
Merlin: It's obvious to me and worth mentioning to me is that unlike something like, I don't know, I guess a good example would be weather or maybe it's morale or something.
Merlin: But weather's a good one where you don't control the weather.
Merlin: And a change in the weather could change the conditions that make you sort of revisit your strategy.
Merlin: The things that you're talking about here, none of those will get better on their own, and they will, in fact, get a lot worse and be both cumulative and multivariate in their effects.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Again, I realize this is obvious, but this is the kind of thing that was not obvious to me when I was a kid and went, oh, did you shoot a machine gun in Da Nang or whatever?
Merlin: And it's like, well, no.
Merlin: I made sure that when it was time for there to be machine guns, there would be the right amount to the right place.
Merlin: You see this during stuff like hurricane relief.
Merlin: where it's like you see when it's done well, you see when it's done poorly.
Merlin: And you can see these military-ish guys, like that guy General Monterey or whatever, have this uncanny ability to understand how to manage people, deploy resources,
Merlin: and stay in front of a problem that has been well-defined but could change.
Merlin: And that, to me, I mean, nothing against the people who did shoot the machine guns, but that's miraculous to me.
Merlin: The mind that it takes to manage other people and that you really rely on this.
Merlin: I mentioned this briefly a few months ago, but I was thinking about it so much, how...
Merlin: In business and in the military, it is like a chess game in the sense that, let's just say that pawn represents everybody who moves a box in Texas.
Merlin: Well, I need to know that everybody, I don't want my pawn to suddenly turn into a Bazooka Joe comic.
Merlin: Like, that always needs to be a pawn that I can deploy.
Merlin: So those all need to be compartmentalized.
Merlin: You know, yes or no, sir, no excuse, sir.
Merlin: Your problem never leaves the store.
Merlin: You take care of this.
Merlin: And you start to really appreciate, well, there's, you know, there's the army way and every other way.
Merlin: Like, that's the way we do it.
Merlin: And nobody ever doubts that it may not be the best way, but it's our way.
Merlin: This is how we do it.
Merlin: And I think that is miraculous.
Merlin: It's...
Merlin: I mean, it's, I don't know, it's maybe it's the kind of thing like you get like me or my grandpa where you're like, ah, I wonder what it costs to bring all that prime rib to Las Vegas.
Merlin: You know, where you're like, somebody does that every day.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Yeah, that's the great thing about going and just parking your car down at the port and watching for a couple of hours where you're like, whoa, it just keeps coming.
John: What is it all?
John: It's all stuff.
Merlin: You're learning from Ukraine.
Merlin: And so you've given like a general sketch of that.
Merlin: Have you found ways to hook that up yet to your life?
John: Yeah.
John: So what I'm realizing is that the way I manage my own life is as if I was Colonel Bo Greitz and I was in charge of all of the vision of the military.
John: In other words,
John: I thought that being a successful grownup man, my whole life was to be an effective combat team and that everybody that was moving, uh,
John: boxes around the world were a bunch of pencil pushing uh pencil necks they were they were pencil pencil pencil men they're pencil men right and with the the implication being that they were not up to it they didn't have the as they say uh the right stuff they didn't have the right stuff to be a bird colonel and so he's going to send machine guns to people right there's a part of me that feels like i'm the russian army
John: Because there's a lot of corruption in me, right?
John: There's a lot of skimming of resources.
John: There's somewhat a lot of sending false reports up the chain.
John: Get a little distracted sometimes.
John: Right?
John: Like sometimes when the president of John Roderick wants a report, he gets a report that eliminates some of the variables that
John: just because he doesn't want to be distracted.
John: And what happens is that long tail that would support a functioning enterprise gets neglected.
John: The boxes get pushed over to the side.
John: Nobody's rotating the tires.
John: because it's not the glamorous work.
John: It's not the, you know.
Merlin: And just to correct, just to be clear here about what I was saying, ha-ha bird colonel.
Merlin: Well, I mean, I don't know a ton about how any field of the military works, but it isn't that you move up in ranks by being a good...
Merlin: fighter per se it's you're good at doing whatever your job is whether that's administering a hospital or doing accounting or dealing with you know training or whatever it is like that person's bird is just as good as the other guy's bird oh this was another thing that matt martin taught me he said the reason that nobody in the army or the air force or the navy or the marines gets a job and keeps it for 15 years
John: That's the opposite of that.
John: You get a job, you do it for a year, and then they move you to a different job.
John: And I was like, well, that seems dumb because wouldn't a person right when they got good at doing that job, why would you move?
John: And he says, because the point is not the person, the point is the job.
John: And everybody should be able to do the job, right?
John: I see.
John: We don't want you to be the only guy who knows where the forums are.
John: Right.
John: Right?
John: It's a way of eliminating that problem.
John: Wow.
John: Like, oh, no, sorry, we have to talk to Sergeant so-and-so because he's the only one who knows where the keys are.
John: It's like, nope.
John: Everybody keeps moving.
John: And what happens is everybody can do every job, right?
John: And the person at that particular rank, you can slot them in anywhere.
John: because at that rank, you know they can do these jobs, and so you can put them over here.
Merlin: And they demonstrated they've gotten that far up.
Merlin: I bet, by and large, they've shown that they can work with other people, not just manage other people, but like where my wife works, it's very important that people be collegial.
Merlin: And like the more you move up, the more collegial you need to be.
Merlin: That doesn't mean you can never do or say anything controversial, but it does mean you have to do and say controversial things in a collegial way, which is a point completely lost on, I think, a lot of folks.
Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And I think in the military, every time there's a bump in rank, every time you go up, like only one in five people makes the jump.
John: Oh, so it becomes like a funnel.
John: Yeah.
John: There are all these captains, but only some of them become majors.
John: And so you get stopped at the level of your incompetency.
Right.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Like you just, you hit there and then you didn't get promoted.
John: Major Peter.
John: And you have, and then you have to make the choice.
John: Like the army will let you stay at, at, at captain.
John: up until you're 39 years old or something, you know, they'll like, you can get passed over promotion a bunch of times and just stay there as captain.
John: But at a certain point, they're going to say, now you're too old to be a captain.
John: You never got promoted to a major and you're too old to be a captain.
John: If it was going to happen, it would have happened.
John: Right.
John: And I think what, what Matt was at the level of like, there are a lot of Lieutenant colonels, not a lot, but Lieutenant colonel is a thing in the, in the services and
John: where you get there and you're in command.
Merlin: Because if you become a Fulberg colonel, you're a heartbeat away from being a general in some ways.
John: You're a big shot.
John: And I think the funnel really narrows between lieutenant colonel and colonel.
John: And there are a lot of really good lieutenant colonels.
John: These aren't the people that are like, oops, sorry, couldn't make colonel.
John: It's like, no, no, no.
John: Now you've got to choose.
John: Now you have a wealth of people to choose from.
John: And it's the, it's the ones that can give really bad news in a congenial way.
John: Right.
John: Maybe.
John: So it's like, you're really good at what you do, but there's that, there's that little thing.
John: And sometimes it's this and sometimes it's that, but, but like this guy maybe really has a winning smile.
John: I mean, I don't know what it is, but at that level, when the funnel gets narrow, like not many people get, get their first star.
John: Right.
John: And they have to be good.
John: And I,
John: have been so contemptuous, contemptuous, and you've heard it from me for a decade, contemptuous of logistics.
John: Not because I didn't love watching logistics, but internally, like my own.
Merlin: I think most people like that, John.
Merlin: The response from most people is basically these three words.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: it's like well hang on like it actually is kind of a big deal how we plan to pack the car when we go camping we once had a camping trip that we had to cancel because and this is this is it was a lot of people's fault but in the end it was my fault because i was the bird colonel of packing we couldn't tie the dog to the back bumper did you tie grandma's dog to the back bumper am i gonna eat or am i gonna starve to death
Merlin: Can I help you with that, please?
Merlin: That's about the best, Clark.
Merlin: It's funny.
Merlin: Wait, what were we saying?
John: You were saying camping trip got canceled.
Merlin: Yeah, because we couldn't fit all of our stuff in.
Merlin: And that was... It was very, very stressful.
Merlin: You know, I get stressed when I have to travel anywhere, even if it's just a good camping.
Merlin: Long story short, what we eventually learned was, hey, why are we screwing around trying to fit this into a... What was it?
Merlin: A 1998 Jetta?
Merlin: Like, why don't we rent...
Merlin: like one of those kinds of cars we would never in a million years want to own.
Merlin: Why don't we get a crossover SUV where everything will fit comfortably in here with room to spare?
Merlin: And suddenly now that dad's stress has gone down, everybody's stress goes down and it just, it becomes a lot, a lot more, a lot more pleasant.
Yeah.
Merlin: But, you know, just real quick in passing, then one thing also, and I know this is said to be a huge problem with what's happening in Russia is the whole, like, well, we can't tell.
Merlin: You know, Putin doesn't want to hear anything.
Merlin: He's scared of people, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Merlin: But, like, you also notice this thing that I admire and aspire to, even though I admire it and aspire it because I am terrible at it, which is I don't like bad news.
Merlin: I don't like hearing things that disrupt my plan.
Merlin: I don't like any of that stuff.
Merlin: But boy, is that ever a recipe for disaster.
Merlin: So many people who end up being really good leaders only mostly want to hear the bad news and they don't want somebody to tell them
Merlin: They don't want people to tell them what it is that they think they want to hear.
Merlin: And I think that's true for several reasons, including the obvious one of like, well, I can't operate within the constraints that are on us right now if I don't know what's happening in, you know, close to real time.
Merlin: But the other way to look at this, and you could look at this in terms of comedy, really, opportunities.
Merlin: You lose so many opportunities if you're operating on old good news.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Like, including like an improv, it could be a lot funnier if everybody's there the moment it fell apart.
Merlin: And then like you make magic out of that.
Merlin: But also as a leader, you might not realize, oh, you know, oh, don't don't tell Putin the weather's changing.
Merlin: Like, well, think about how many opportunities are lost.
Merlin: You see these these these poor 90 year old generals on cable news just champing at the bit about what they would do if they were up against the Russian army.
Merlin: You can see that it's just killing them.
Merlin: That they can't just go in there and be good soldiers doing like good ordinary soldier stuff.
Merlin: But isn't that kind of part of it though?
Merlin: It's like you have to crave the appearance of new, potentially not positive news because that is, those are, each one of those is an opportunity that mustn't be lost.
Merlin: It's not just keeping the general happy.
Merlin: It's that you need up to date factual information in order to capitalize on opportunities.
Merlin: Right.
John: Well, and this is exactly what has been so interesting about this for me and why it's gotten me back lurking on Twitter, not commenting, but lurking, is that my whole life, what I wanted to hear
John: It was generals and State Department guys and spooks in khaki trench coats and people that had the satellite information sitting on nightly news shows talking about the strategy and Putin's mindset and all of this stuff.
John: That's what I thought this whole thing was about.
John: And somehow I got linked into this world on Twitter, and I think it's because it's what's interesting about this war.
John: Where I'm listening to command master sergeants talk about the quality of the gasoline that they don't have.
John: And saying, do you want to know why this didn't work?
John: Because they didn't rotate their tires.
John: You didn't.
John: Your tires lost their plasticity and you blew it.
John: Right.
John: And there's so many of those people where they're people that are not trying to talk to you about...
John: Putin's mindset, the global balance of power.
John: They're just trying to say, this is a supply chain problem.
John: And on paper, and from the satellite, it looks like they're undefeatable.
John: But I'm telling you that in 16 hours, they're not going to have...
John: any more sandwich meat.
John: And that is actually the problem.
John: And the problem is not.
Merlin: And nobody's telling them.
John: And nobody knows it, right?
John: And Putin doesn't know it, but also none of the pundits on TV are talking about it.
John: And also maybe the soldiers don't know that there's, that tomorrow at 1600 hours, there's no more lunch meat and that's the end.
Merlin: Did you see the photos of like expired MREs?
Merlin: Oh yeah.
Merlin: Like two years expired MREs.
Merlin: I saw some MREs from 1985.
Merlin: Wow, that's from our vintage.
John: That's when we were really scared of nuclear.
John: Yeah, they had real meat in the tins.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But all that stuff, you know.
John: Furky bullshit.
John: And that's what's so wonderful about these master sergeants or guys that are on that side of the story.
Merlin: Hire up like warrant officer, like you're still non-commissioned, but you're like one of those guys who's been like a sergeant forever and not because you're incompetent, but because like you're just really good at that job.
John: Yeah.
John: And people that can look at a thing and go, look, do you see how this is there?
John: Well, that doesn't belong there.
John: This is from a different thing.
John: And somebody welded it on here because they thought that it would do this.
John: And there are people that have enough experience to know why somebody would have done that.
John: And explaining that for them to have gone that far, it means that's the secret.
John: It means that
John: They're already completely out of this supply.
John: Right.
John: For them to have done this, for them to have made this little wealth.
John: Nobody does this kind of stuff unless there's no other choice.
John: Unless there's no other choice.
John: And if they are at that level already, then no matter what it looks like from the satellite and no matter what the analysts say, I can tell you already that at least this group no longer has any screwdrivers.
John: And I don't, so what we don't know yet watching it or what I don't know yet is like, is this true?
John: They're all saying in 22 days, there's no more notebook paper.
John: And I'm like, wow.
John: First lunch meat, now notebook paper.
John: Let me set the egg timer for 22 days.
John: Get me putting on the blower.
John: Get me lunch meat.
John: Oh, or spray notebook.
John: There's no, we've got notebook paper still.
John: You call this pastrami?
John: I'm thrilled to see not only the Russian army fall apart, but in some ways, the whole Western intelligence strategy, like the whole 10-layer cake of what we think of as geopolitical,
John: and war analysts.
Merlin: Is that partly, well, I don't know if it's a leading question or a dumb question, but like, for example, everybody, including the U.S., was saying, hey, look, this is going to be a cakewalk for Russia.
Merlin: They're going to come in there.
Merlin: We've seen the satellites.
Merlin: They're going to come in, completely overwhelm these poor ding-a-lings in Ukraine.
Merlin: And just take over the place, you know, a month on the outside.
Merlin: That they'll be in Kiev in three weeks or something like that.
Merlin: Is it that kind of thing also where it's like, oh, we must have gotten something real wrong.
Merlin: What did we get so wrong?
John: Well, and I think it was even the lieutenant colonels in the U.S.
John: Army that had been to Ukraine or that had been anywhere...
John: We're like, actually, for them to be that good, you would already need to see this many containers sitting on the tarmac at this airport and they're not there.
John: So your satellites actually are telling you that they can't do what they're saying because I know how many pallets there need to be of bottled water and I don't see them.
John: So there were people the whole way that were like, actually, it's just, you know, nobody loved the CIA more than me.
John: in 1980 and in by 1990 i was very disappointed in the cia and by 2000 boy i didn't have a good word to say about them and now i feel like they're they're not doing anything like they're they're active the cia is actively uh like a foreign agent almost their their intelligence is so bad
John: And they miss so much because they're an institution that just is up its own ass.
John: And a lot of it is they have all the money and they have no accountability because nobody can challenge them because it's all secret.
John: And they failed.
John: And the whole idea of that side of American foreign policy, it's just failed.
John: And it was so cool, and there were so many great movies about it, and all the people that had little pens that had little daggers in them and stuff on your umbrella.
John: And it's all just terrible.
John: It's just not...
John: It's not working.
Merlin: It seems like such a psychotic organization sometimes.
Merlin: And that's not even just the, like, make Castro's beard fallout kind of stuff.
Merlin: But, like, it feels like such a psychotic organization.
John: Well, like, the NSA...
John: is built at least I think around the idea that they are monitoring every single cell phone conversation in the world looking for somebody to say Castro's beard.
John: And then they're going to be like, and now we're going to, you know, what are they saying about Castro's beard?
John: When it turns out in this war, it's just smiling over to shoot a blow door.
John: Right.
John: And like, like, like that's what information is and that's what data and that's what, that's what intelligence is.
John: And in Ukraine, it's just, you know, the Russians just were using cell phones or walkie-talkies they got at the drugstore.
Merlin: And they blew up the 3G towers that would have let them use their secure communications.
Merlin: It's that kind of thing.
John: We're like, are you guys talking to each other?
John: You read the thing, right, where the where the that 40 mile long convoy was just the Ukrainians had gotten their walkie talkies and were calling the guy and saying, like, convoys on its way.
John: It'll be here.
John: You know, it's six hours.
John: It's going to be there.
John: But you did Ukrainian prank calls.
John: Yeah.
John: And the Russians, the Russians at the airport outside of Kiev were like, oh, OK, well, just hold on.
John: The guy said it's going to be here in eight hours.
John: So, like, just hold your hold ground.
Merlin: I have a question about your refrigerator.
Merlin: Is it running?
John: It's exactly that.
John: And meanwhile, the Ukrainians are like throwing Molotov cocktails at the trucks and they're like, no, no, no.
John: It'll be there tomorrow.
John: I'm sorry.
John: We just got a little hung up.
John: We'll be there tomorrow.
John: And they kept pranking them.
John: That's ridiculous.
John: And they never rerouted the convoy because on both sides,
John: They were being told, oh, no, no, no, we got this.
John: Don't worry.
John: Just give us another six hours.
Merlin: There's like first principles, Clarice.
Merlin: Wasn't there also this thing?
Merlin: I keep hearing this, and I don't know how we would ever find out whether this is true, but I've heard it said that a lot of at least the initial forces that were being sent into Ukraine were told it was a training mission.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Is that true?
John: Yeah, it was just a training mission.
John: Uh, well, no, they were told it was a training mission right up until the day they crossed into Ukraine.
John: And then they were told that they were going over there to be, um, to use a military term.
John: It's actually for realsies.
John: It's for realsies, but it's not, they're going to, the Ukrainians are going to welcome us with open arms because they are our brothers.
John: That's true.
John: And this is this, this is the state department thing too, right?
John: The, the idea that the idea that just because someone in Alabama and someone in Ohio is,
John: Speak the same language nominally.
John: Right.
John: That the people in Alabama are going to welcome the people of Ohio coming down and liberating them from their Alabama government.
John: And that is, I don't think how it would play out.
John: We have some listeners in Alabama.
John: I hear from them periodically.
John: Yeah.
John: Because they figure out how to get their computer.
Merlin: Okay.
John: I've got people there, so be careful.
John: And I know for a fact that no one in Ohio wants to have like an Alabama army come in.
John: come into downtown Columbus and start telling them how to make barbecue.
Merlin: Well, let's bring it back to San Francisco.
Merlin: Would people in the Outer Sunset want the government of the Castro coming in and vice versa?
Merlin: No, I don't think so.
Merlin: We're talking about two and a half, three miles apart.
Merlin: It goes for everything.
Merlin: You know what it is, John?
Merlin: I'm so simple.
Merlin: I'm such a basic person in so many ways.
Merlin: It's just hard for me to believe...
Merlin: especially amidst years and years and years of conspiracy theories moving from left-wing ding-a-lings to right-wing ding-a-lings and back.
Merlin: Like, it's just so crazy to me that it appears to be what it seems, which is just so many levels of, so many, as they say in the UK, so many own goals.
Merlin: Like, so many things where, like, even just the basic stuff that they would teach you
Merlin: you know, in officer candidate school or whatever.
Merlin: The basic stuff about, like, running the shop, it seems to be falling apart on every level, and it's bizarre.
John: And I think connecting it to conspiracy theories is exactly what I'm doing, too, because...
John: I've always been against conspiracy theories for the most part because I've always felt like people are not smart enough to pull off.
Merlin: Most conspiracy theorists have never, obviously never managed a project.
John: Right.
John: Have never had five people that they just tried to get to do one thing.
John: Try and get two people to have a call at the same time.
John: Trying to get somebody from Columbus and somebody from Alabama to agree on a barbecue recipe.
John: Oh boy.
John: You can't do it.
John: All they agree is no mustard.
John: But what we find looking at this is like... Keep it low country.
John: Stash it.
John: If the whole world is being run by a global cabal of bankers and tech billionaires, how in the hell can this entire thing be down to the number of times they've rotated the tires on their trucks?
John: It's just, it's always that simple.
John: It's always down to just that people are dumb and whether they maintain their truck or not is the deciding factor.
John: And there's nobody in charge.
John: And the people that are in charge have no idea.
John: They're just trying to move these pallets from here to there because they always got a ribbon when they did it before.
John: And now somebody's like, okay, great.
John: Well, you're in charge now.
John: And they're like, please just give me some pallets to move.
John: Please, please, please.
John: I got so many ribbons.
John: Look at all the ribbons.
John: And everybody's like that.
John: It's all like that.
John: You know, my, my ladies look interviewing for jobs.
John: She's a high level executive.
John: And as far as I can tell, when I debrief her at the end of all these job interviews,
John: Nobody knows anything, you know, like nobody knows.
Merlin: It really is quite shocking sometimes.
Merlin: It's astonishing.
Merlin: You know, I believe it was maybe one of his characters, but Kurt Vonnegut, who first said, as far as I remember, anybody who can't explain what they do for a living to a 10-year-old is a charlatan.
Merlin: And there's so many people you run into where, like, you're like, hey, you know, pop quiz, hotshot.
Merlin: Like, you know, what's the second most difficult thing about your job?
Merlin: You know, like, what is it that you say you do?
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: I mean, it is...
Merlin: It is weird, and I don't know.
Merlin: I'm trying to get out of the business of, you know, prognosticating, and I don't know, even as I move into the phase of life where I'd like to think I'm wise.
Merlin: Something I realized in the last year or two that's become a tentpole for me, and it doesn't make me happy to say this, but it does make me feel sane to realize this, is that whenever you don't or can't currently understand someone's motivation, it almost always comes down to fear, money, or both.
Merlin: And really, I mean, you know, the thing is, for a lot of people, it really is money.
Merlin: It's like, no, I can't come to your party, but I don't want to tell you it's because I can't afford two bus fares that day.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: But like, fear.
Merlin: Like, in that case, the fear of somebody's going to ask me to do something besides fill out the form.
Merlin: Again, a little bit like office space, I guess.
Merlin: to fill out the form for this particular kind of palette.
Merlin: Well, you didn't tell me you were changing the palette form, and now that's fear because loss of all the fears that we have, loss of respect or loss of admiration or just that feeling of being the only person who's not in on what's happening.
Merlin: Money or fear, fear and money.
Merlin: And I think if one were to allow that as a thought experiment,
Merlin: a thought technology for a while, it is shocking sometimes.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be reductive because money can mean lots of things and fear can mean lots of things.
Merlin: They both imply status.
Merlin: Their status is implied by both of them.
Merlin: But do you know what I mean?
Merlin: If you live in a perpetual state of fear, then you're not going to want new information.
Merlin: And if you're in this privation mentality about losing money,
Merlin: you know, you're standing in the community, that's going to lead to a lot of weird decisions too.
Merlin: And everybody's got their own version of that, but that's often really what it comes down to, I think.
John: And the other thing is like just plain dumbness.
John: We're all so dumb.
John: We're really dumb.
John: When I think about, talk about Vonnegut, remember the Kilgore Trout short story where the two...
John: Pieces of yeast were talking and they were like debating about what the meaning of life is and what their purpose is.
John: And, uh, and meanwhile they were eating sugar and then they suffocated in their own shit and
Merlin: and neither of them ever realized that they were making champagne so it goes yeah yeah the bubbles and the the yeast died so it goes yeah or like you know again the the the way over quoted david foster wallace uh address you know when the one fish says to the other how how's the water today and the second fish goes what's water and this is water is the thing that that your aunt is sending to everyone
Merlin: If you find more lessons from this, I hope you'll continue to share them.
Merlin: I have a lot to learn, John.
John: I'm thinking about it all the time, and I don't know how to exactly... I have to dismantle a lot of... Not faith in institutions, but faith in institution.
John: And...
John: And in dismantling it, I'm also dismantling my own kind of arrogant, smug relationship to institutions.
John: Right, like, I've always been counter-institutional, but that alone requires that you believe in the institution.
Merlin: That's an insightful thing to realize.
Merlin: It's absolutely true.
Merlin: It is a form of, probably not privilege, but it's definitely a form of, like, societal confidence that this is a thing, like, people were saying starting roughly, let's say, around January of 2017.
Merlin: I just want to go back to not feeling...
Merlin: like I have to follow the news every single day because it has become an existential threat to me.
Merlin: I liked it better when things were boring and I didn't have to know things about how Congress worked, which might not be the most enlightened thing in the world to say, but boy, was that ever a familiar feeling.
Merlin: I really don't want to be the smartest one in the room ever.
John: Like when you're on social media, you're like, wow, the world is really fucked up.
John: Yeah.
John: And then you get off social media.
John: That's the stock and trade.
John: And you're like, oh, wait, social media is fucked up.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: But you can't know it if it's your world, right?
John: You're in it and you're like, oh, man, everything's fucked up.
John: And then, I mean, I stepped away from it for a year and realized, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
John: 80% of that is just in that closed system.
John: And to just step out of it, it all goes away.
John: It just disappears because you're not hearing those voices.
Merlin: This has been a theme on Dubai Friday for a year now is that at least, which is like Twitter's only real because people think it's real and that's what makes it real.
John: Yeah, you go in there and you pour your blood into it, and then you're like, well, all my blood is here.
John: How the hell can it not be real?
John: Well, and ditto.
Merlin: I had a realization watching all these, like, you know, Theranos and NXIVM and all these weird, you know, cult documentaries and...
Merlin: dramatizations and it's like the thing is the more skin you have in the game the more you need that fabulous to be real and for what they say to be true because at that point you have so much skin in the game you have so much in the case of like for example with um the anna delvey story uh you know that woman rachel who ends up charging five figures on her vanity fair credit card because and then
Merlin: hoping that Anna will pay her back.
Merlin: And it's like, well, at that point, she's so mega fucked that the last thing in the world that she needs is for Annie Delvey to not actually be a German heiress.
Merlin: Because that would end her.
Merlin: Because she made so many poor decisions that brought her up to that point.
Merlin: And this goes for lots of stuff.
Merlin: It goes for multi-level marketing.
Merlin: It goes for so many different things where, like, it really is just your force of will that keeps this real and that keeps it real for other people, too, until it does eventually start to fall apart.
John: And you think about then you apply that to Aldrich Ames or to the spy.
John: Yeah.
John: The FBI spy.
John: That was a C that was a KGB guy.
John: And all these guys that were like, Oh, for all these years, they've been giving away our agents, phone numbers and all these, you know, like 15 CIA agents died because Aldrich Ames,
John: put a piece of bubble gum under a park bench in, in, uh, in Washington, DC.
John: And now it turns out that actually defeating the Russians is just about putting, is just about letting the air out of their tires.
John: And it's that easy.
John: And all of the, all of the ICBMs that are sitting in silos out in Iowa are
John: you know still like fueled and ready to go like it turns out actually all all that you needed to do was was like key their car and they come out and they're like oh no that's all you know the video of boris yeltsin being drunk and dancing
Merlin: Remember that?
Merlin: He's out there.
Merlin: He's really getting into it.
Merlin: And he's kind of doing that Trump double hand job gesture that he does.
Merlin: Like he's doing some middle-out compression on two fellas.
Merlin: But he's just drunk as hell.
Merlin: There's some nice compilations of that.
Merlin: That would be what?
Merlin: That would be 98, 99.
Merlin: Putin came in in 99, right?
Merlin: 2000, yeah.
Merlin: 2000, yeah.
John: That picture of Brezhnev with the swimming cap on and he's in a floaty and he's like in an inner tube or something in a swimming pool and there are two KGB agents on either side of him keeping him from sinking.
John: And you're like, wow, I looked at that picture so many times trying to figure out how the Russian bear was going to respond to Castro's beard.
John: And it just turns out we're all just making champagne.
John: We're all just fat men floating in different pools.