Ep. 461: "The New Alignment"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hey, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Thank you for your patience.
John: Oh, of course.
John: Oh, I know how it is when you start taking your computer apart.
Merlin: Oh, John.
Merlin: John, sometimes, I don't know, you know.
Merlin: Yeah, I do.
Merlin: You wake up on a Monday.
Merlin: I hadn't slept very well.
Merlin: I had two different dreams about two different boarding schools.
Merlin: Not a good night.
Merlin: Didn't sleep well.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no.
Merlin: It's no good when the Paris airport and the Las Vegas stream get together, one of the powers activate, shape of an anxiety ladder.
Merlin: Then I woke up and I did edit it out.
Merlin: And sometimes I feel like a digital farmer, you know, like I've got like a family farm I take care of.
Merlin: And some days I wake up and I'm a very busy digital farmer and my fence went down and my breeder cows are out fucking off and I don't know what's going on.
John: Is this all a Sims reference?
John: What's happened?
John: What is a digital farmer?
Merlin: I built a Minecraft on my breeder cow.
John: Okay, sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: First, you got to hit a tree with the stick.
Merlin: See?
Merlin: And then you can make a crafting bench.
Merlin: No, I had a lot of things.
Merlin: And you know how it is, John?
Merlin: Look at my fingers right now.
Merlin: They're all kind of gnarled and grabbing.
Merlin: They are gnarled.
Merlin: Yeah?
Merlin: That's because everything's connected.
John: Okay, yes.
Merlin: Do you ever get that feeling like everything's connected?
Yeah.
John: I don't have a house full of Internet of Things, so I can say for sure that some things aren't connected.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, this involves, given my usual comportment as a digital farmer, I hope I'm not stealing valor from anybody by saying that.
Merlin: There are real digital farmers out there that are like, how dare you?
Merlin: I bet there's people in China with like 45 Android phones in front of them.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: It's a kind of digital farming, but like this involves relatively few things from the internet.
Merlin: And it's mostly just, you know, anyway, I'm sorry I had to fix things.
Merlin: And on top of it all, I got some seltzer that might be arriving after a while that I forgot about.
Merlin: So that might be part of the show.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: We can take a little break when the seltzer arrives.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I mean, I'm so happy you're here.
Merlin: I'm so happy you do the program.
Merlin: And, you know, I'm just a simple farmer.
John: I know.
John: And that's the thing.
John: I feel like the modern world has taken you away from the simplicity.
John: My agrarian roots.
John: Yeah, just being a simple digital farmer.
Merlin: So simple.
John: You know what I work for?
Merlin: I work from Candle Cant.
Merlin: Oh, you did.
Merlin: That's my hours.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Says it right here on the door, can't and can't.
Merlin: From can till can't.
Merlin: Hey, it's can 30 and he's not here yet.
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John: You do.
John: You know, blood, sweat, and tears.
John: Yes.
John: You sacrifice a lot for people.
John: I don't know if everybody knows how much.
Merlin: I've got to be honest with you, man.
Merlin: I don't know if this is for the show.
Merlin: I appreciate the support.
Merlin: You know, simple digital family farmers.
Merlin: What we have to deal with nowadays is just, it's unbelievable.
Merlin: You know, we're all on our own.
Merlin: I'm not like one of those milk farmers or one of those other kinds of farmers that gets corn.
John: Do you don't get subsidies as a digital farmer?
Merlin: Zero subsidies.
Merlin: This all comes out of my family farm pocket.
Merlin: I'm wearing these digital overalls, as you can see.
John: Does Scott Simpson, is he also a digital farmer?
John: Do you know?
Merlin: I think he's, let's see.
Merlin: Okay, so if this were D&D and we were working out character classes before we ever get into alignment, I think he's probably a digital bard.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay, digital bard.
Merlin: And I always thought of bard.
Merlin: Bards and monks, to me, were very interesting.
Merlin: I mean, back then, that was pretty exotic.
Merlin: I think today, like, that's a whole thing.
Merlin: But it used to be a big deal when you started talking about bards.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because you got bards who are basically...
Merlin: Fighters with loots.
Merlin: With loots, right.
Merlin: They're like, oh, brave Sir Roberts.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, exactly.
Merlin: He turned his tail and ran away.
Merlin: He needs two-factor authentication today.
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I don't think a farmer's a class, but maybe in the digital realm.
Merlin: Now, I bet you're a digital cleric.
John: Well, so for a while I was a cleric.
John: I always wanted to be a paladin, but I do feel like cleric might be closer.
John: I'm not sure.
Merlin: Paladin has elements of that because it's a fighter class, but because, unless you're an anti-paladin, of course, you got to be lawful good.
Merlin: you get a plus something on your bladed weapons because in a cleric-like way, and stop me if I'm getting this wrong because I haven't studied farm stuff in forever.
Merlin: My farmer player handbook has been in a pile for a while.
Merlin: But you get the, because you've got a god, right?
Merlin: If you're a paladin, the reason you're lawful good is you're like a knight representing this particular...
Merlin: So it's got elements of fighter, it's got elements of a cleric.
Merlin: Please don't email me.
Merlin: There's no email in this game.
Merlin: Keep it in, period.
John: So this is the thing.
John: This is maybe always my problem with the cleric alignment and paladin alignment.
John: Clerics have to be lawful, correct?
John: Well, you can be neutral.
John: Okay.
John: Yeah, you can be lawful neutral.
Merlin: But you can't be like a chaotic Catholic.
John: No, I think you can be neutral.
John: Good.
John: If you're a, if you're a cleric, but the thing is I could never, I could never identify with any of those alignments because I feel like I've always had a chaotic alignment.
John: And so to be a paladin or a cleric, I'd have to be allied with something.
John: And I,
John: You know, like for a long time, I felt like I was chaotic good.
John: I went through a long phase.
John: Oh, me too.
Merlin: Chaotic good ranger.
Merlin: That was always my jam.
John: Okay.
John: So that, and I was a magic user, chaotic good magic user.
John: Oh boy.
John: That's definitely a low level.
John: For a while.
John: It was.
John: You have to sleep a lot.
John: I spent a lot of time.
John: There's a lot, there's a lot of magic use naps.
John: You know, my bones got turned to jelly so often and then, you know, and then you'd encounter a, then you'd encounter a bug bear and what are you going to do?
Merlin: What are you going to do?
Merlin: I'll be over here taking a nap and trying to remember spells and stuff.
John: But then for a while, it wasn't that long ago that I felt like, wow, maybe my alignment has really switched to chaotic neutral.
John: I never felt like a chaotic neutral, but it's like any personality test.
John: You run down the list of things.
Merlin: Oh, like which sex in the city alignment are you?
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And I'm not a Miranda at all, but I did feel like, am I no longer chaotic?
John: Good.
John: That felt like I had lost something.
John: And then I realized the power of chaotic neutral.
Merlin: Can we stipulate also, it's so vitally important that no one contact us about anything we're saying.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Is that understood?
Merlin: Because I feel like no matter how often, there's probably no point in going on about it.
Merlin: But I remember at one point, because normally, you can think of that Elric of Mel in the Bone type, who's chaotic evil.
Merlin: You get the eight arrows pointing in different directions, and that's like the sign of chaos, I think.
Merlin: Mm-mm.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Somebody, I remember once hearing that, like, to really understand what lawful versus chaotic means, I don't know if this is true.
Merlin: I might have imagined this, but I feel like in fairly, maybe even recent times, I heard someone say that to understand alignment, lawful versus chaotic is part about your...
Merlin: It's kind of, it's kind of like, are you an institutionalist or not?
Merlin: Like, do you believe in order in the sense of like, can society be trusted to do things?
Merlin: Lawful isn't just upholding laws, right?
Merlin: Isn't lawful also that like you believe in the order of society without regard to whether you're a good guy or bad guy?
Merlin: Right.
John: And in that sense, I mean, that's, I always see, this is the thing about the two, the two axes of an alignment is,
John: I always felt like to be chaotic good, the good necessitated that you believe in a higher order.
John: Right.
John: Whereas you could flip that around and say, you know, like lawful.
John: good.
John: It's the lawful that's talking about the higher order, but it's an order of institution.
Merlin: Well, let me ask you a really simple question.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I just told you my reckon about what I think lawful.
Merlin: What is good and evil, John?
Merlin: What does that mean in the world of alignment to you?
Merlin: Do you have any extra sour cream to put on that potato?
John: You know, unfortunately, because I'm a liberal and I know all of our politics,
John: Our listeners who are evil or who are Elon Musk ballers or whatever might be rolling their eyes at me calling myself a liberal, but as a liberal, I just... I beat your eye roll with a saving throw, so don't worry.
John: Thank you.
John: I necessarily believe that good means that you believe in the collective effort, the idea that human beings are working, are all pulling on the oars,
John: to get our viking boats to another shore oh boy and that if you are evil what what that essentially you're such a good public speaker i think you must be some kind of allied summit with with the clergy or possibly multi-level dungeon marketing well and i always wondered i always wondered if in a in a different society in one where where things were were ordered differently whether i would have gone into some sort of good clerical role and
Merlin: Oh, interesting.
Merlin: Instead of being the head of the old-time CIA.
John: Yeah, I think it would be, I think I'd be a monk.
John: I'd be like Father Pulig.
John: I'd be out sort of, you know, like warrior monk, warrior monk.
Merlin: And if memory serves, if you're a monk, you get the vibrating palm, and you also get like four feet, I don't have this in front of me, but something like four feet of free fall bouncing off a wall.
Merlin: You do a kind of holy rappelling.
John: Yeah, and that's a great Beastie Boys lyric, too.
John: But I believe the children are our future, of course, as we say all the time here.
John: But also I think that I feel like evil is naked self-interest and naked self-interest that often reads as cowardice.
John: Because when confronted with the situation, do you stand for anything or do you run?
John: Because naked self-interest is you survive.
John: That ends up being because you because, you know, if you're evil, you're also although, you know, the great evils.
John: the ones that are playing three-dimensional chess, the ones that are thinking way, way ahead, they're still trying to accomplish, ultimately, a selfish goal.
Merlin: I was about to say that, yes, that was in the common tongue.
Merlin: I think you're absolutely right.
Merlin: And this is what brings me to a topic that I'm going to call the new alignment.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right, good.
Merlin: Because, I mean, there's a lot of ways of looking at this.
Merlin: Let's be honest, I didn't play this game very often.
Merlin: We mostly sat around and drank Mountain Dew and made character sheets.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like, did anybody ever actually play this game?
Merlin: I mean, I spent hours and hours and months of my life
Merlin: I carried a, I almost got like late onset scoliosis from carrying around a duffel bag with every book and die and Ralph Partha character that I had in it.
Merlin: And when I was a very cool guy in ninth grade, I carried, but I didn't actually do campaigns much.
Merlin: The thing is, we talk about this.
John: We think about this a lot.
John: We think about neurodivergence as being on a two-dimensional, like a single axis.
John: You're so far ahead of me.
Merlin: Give me more axes.
Merlin: Give me a Z axis.
Merlin: Give me a Z sub three axis.
Merlin: Give me more axes than just this simple-minded drawing on a piece of paper of horizontal and vertical.
John: I need a lot more axes.
John: The people that were actually rolling dice, writing things down on a piece of paper and saying like, oh, you know, like.
Merlin: Oh, and they're doing encumbrance.
Merlin: And how many gold pieces are you carrying?
Merlin: And did you rest for a round?
Merlin: And it's like this is like you turned a game into into like sitting at the DMV.
John: Into a game, right?
John: I mean, the thing is that for you, saving throw, which is a phrase that you've been using for 40 years, it's a metaphor to you.
John: As soon as you heard it, you were like, oh, saving throw, exactly.
John: And you've applied it to it.
Merlin: As strong as you are.
Merlin: You know what they say?
Merlin: Any given Sunday.
Merlin: Any given Sunday, a fighter thief might be able to beat a paladin.
Merlin: It's all in that throw, baby.
John: But you do it all the time.
John: You're always looking for a saving throw.
John: In particular.
John: Yes, but there are a lot of... And I use Dungeons & Dragons as a metaphor throughout my whole life.
John: If I didn't have the intellectual...
John: like a sub-religion of Dungeons and Dragons, I would have a less colorful life because I think, oh, you know, we're on a campaign.
Merlin: What's your alignment?
Merlin: I'm going to let jokes move out into the waiting room for just a minute and say the thing is that part of what... So this game started out.
Merlin: I at one point bought the reissue of the original Gary Gygax box where the rules were like, put your figure down, try to kill things.
Merlin: Like that was the whole thing.
Merlin: It was basically tabletop,
Merlin: um, what's the name I'm looking for?
Merlin: Like where, where you're doing, like it's big, it's war games more than storytelling.
Merlin: And originally I see.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: But then you got, you get fun.
Merlin: And I think, in my opinion, I have enough.
Merlin: I don't, as you know, I don't read the trades, but when the AD and D that we were playing K 1982 or three, um,
Merlin: It has so much stuff in it where you try to keep this a fun game.
Merlin: It's such a good balance of trying to make this a fun game about storytelling, but also then introducing ways that the story master or the primary story person with the one behind the other screen.
Merlin: We don't say master anymore.
Merlin: We'd be able to take you through a fun story, give you breaks.
Merlin: Sometimes if you did something cool, you get experience points, but like almost every single one of those things, how can you read?
Merlin: How can you then turn 17 and reject that?
Merlin: Because you meet somebody and you'll go like, Oh, I see.
Merlin: this guy's actually kind of chaotic good.
Merlin: Like, he's fucking shit up, but, like, he's got your back kind of thing.
Merlin: This person, the idea, again, of the entropy of, like, roll these 35 different sized dice to see whether or not, you know, the beholder steals your cube.
Merlin: How do you just set that behind you?
Merlin: It's not quite a religion, but it has elements of, like, these are valuable analogies about life.
Merlin: For the lonely boy.
John: And my problem, and I think the thing that kept me from being a member of the Dungeons and Dragons religion properly, instead of being, you know, sort of a Jack D&D, who either takes the law too seriously or decides the law is something else.
John: It is that Jack from Twitter?
John: No, Jack, like Jack Mormon.
John: Oh, the guy who started Mormon.
John: No, no, no.
John: The Jack Mormons are the ones that are like, well, wait a minute.
John: You guys, you know, like you keep having new revelations and changing the course of the religion.
Merlin: I watched two different shows related to Mormons in the past over the weekend.
Merlin: And in both cases, it does seem like there was a lot of strap on stuff.
Merlin: Proctor, Proctor, Proctor Hawk, you add on here.
Merlin: I found some plates, but I can't show them to you.
John: Well, but that's the old stuff.
John: Like the new stuff is, oh, it turns out that all those years that we said black people couldn't be Mormons, we were not wrong then, but we've gotten a subsequent revelation.
John: And then you give the testimony.
John: In fact, no.
John: And now Mormonism is the fastest spreading religion in the world because Mormons are going out to all the places that before they wouldn't have done.
John: Nice to get them dues.
John: Yeah.
John: But then Jack Mormons are also the other side of the thing, which is like, well, I grew up Mormon, but now I live in Seattle's Capitol Hill and I do a drag show.
John: And, you know, but Mormonism is still cultural.
Merlin: You're giving your testimony in a different way with a more flamboyant costume.
John: There you have it.
John: With high heart boots.
John: For me, I always felt like it went out because I started playing D&D in 1980, the fall of 1980.
John: Damn.
John: I know.
John: Early adopter.
John: Although I was... Were you playing basic?
Merlin: Like what became called basic D&D?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: It's not a slight, but you were playing those early modules.
John: I still have all the original like series one books, but they're not like the first edition because that was crazy small.
John: But I have the old ones, you know, that I have...
John: Remember when you would buy a back-to-school packet and it had the little plastic sheet that had all the letters of the alphabet cut in it that you could do stencils?
John: Oh, sure I do.
John: I still have my name stenciled inside of all the books that I did with my little...
Merlin: little plastic that had you know that had the different angles that's the origin of template gothic the uh the font well the font that represents the 90s most famously used um on the poster for reality bites yes it's called template gothic and it's a really nice face and it's impossibly 90s at this point but it was designed to look like those green see-through rulers you would get where you could draw the letters that's so great yeah
Merlin: It really looks like a... Who's the girl from Scissorhands that used to be with the guy from Lemonheads?
John: The Renona.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: She was basically Temple Gothic as an actress.
John: Apparently, Ken Stringfellow always said that they made out at some party or something.
John: I never believed it.
John: Well, got off lucky.
John: The thing about Dungeons & Dragons was when I was 12 or 13, what I really needed was a 16-year-old dungeon master...
John: All we had was 12-year-old dungeon masters, and a 12-year-old just can't be a dungeon master.
John: I'm sorry.
John: They just don't have it.
Merlin: That's like having a guidance counselor who's a lot younger than you.
John: Yeah, you should have a dungeon master probably that's 20, but any 20-year-old that's hanging out with a bunch of 13-year-olds is a little bit...
John: But I always felt this way.
John: It's getting back to the community.
John: Yeah.
John: I always felt this way about when you first get into college and you're like, all my best professors are not PhDs.
John: They're all instructors or they're all, you know, they're like, well, that.
Merlin: Well, no, but I just mean of the people who haven't been beaten down yet.
Merlin: And they're like, they're up to date.
Merlin: They've read things that aren't, that aren't, that are less than 50 years old and they got on fire.
John: There's that class of professor that decided not to go into research and
John: But decided to teach.
John: And some of them were older, but they didn't fall into that like, well, you've got to write a book every three years.
John: You've got to be doing, you know, you've got to be finding something new in Hegel.
John: Although it's like that cow turd's been turned over a million times.
John: You've got to find something new to say about it.
John: Those people...
John: are bad teachers.
John: And the good teachers are the ones that are like, I've been teaching intro to the enlightenment for 15 years.
John: And let me tell you, like, welcome to my class.
John: You know, like, and
John: And that's not how you succeed in academia, but that's actually who you want teaching.
John: I get it.
John: And I feel like that's what it is in dungeon mastering too.
John: If you are rolling that die every time anybody says anything, then you're not telling the story.
John: And if you're telling the story, then you're not being- Oh, okay, you're so far ahead of me.
Merlin: Yes, I a thousand percent agree.
Merlin: Like if you're just there to be the equivalent, I mean, like if you could be replaced by a TI-99-4A, like you're probably not a good storyteller.
John: And the story is, but I've watched a lot of Dungeons and Dragons getting played because I've been nerd adjacent for a long time.
John: I tend to walk into a room where D&D is going down.
John: I stand and watch the game for a little while.
John: Then I move out a different door to a new adventure.
John: Like that basement on the cruise.
John: Yeah, but sometimes you step in and you're like, wow, there's something happening here.
John: And then a lot of times it feels like...
John: it feels like you walked into an accounting office.
John: And that just feels like it never entices me.
Merlin: People want to go and plead their case about their encumbrance and gold pieces.
Merlin: John, can we do a, would you mind if I put in a commercial break right here so that I can go get my seltzer?
John: No, here, why don't you do that and I'll go to the potty too.
John: Oh, great.
Merlin: So stand by for just one minute.
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Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: During your seltzer adventure.
Merlin: Yeah, they were out of the 12-pack, so they got me the 24-packs.
John: Well, that seems like it.
John: It's fine.
Merlin: It's a little harder to dispense, but, you know.
John: I trust you to fill up your vending machines.
John: How was your an oregano?
John: It was good.
John: You know, I spent a little time looking at the various alignment descriptions, and I'm wondering whether or not I'm actually neutral good.
Merlin: neutral good because chaos you're talking here here for now before we develop the new alignment new alignments i like the new alignment that sounds like a good book it doesn't it sounds like a new like a cool rock movement too yeah absolutely like y'all dress the same or something
Merlin: like a like a polyphonic spree you know the new romantics except we're the new alignment it's a little bit more about you and and we'll uh and so before we introduce all those new axes they're going to absolutely blow this game open no one's ever going to play this game again because all you're going to do is argue about alignment you're looking you're looking at the ups and the downs chaotic with regard to order in society and good with regard to your how you handle yourself
John: Yeah, and I feel like chaotic described me at a younger age, and maybe I have moved into neutral good, which still, you know, I'll describe it here.
John: A neutral good character typically acts altruistically, which I believe is true of me, without regard for or against lawful precepts such as rules or tradition.
John: And that feels different from chaotic.
Okay.
John: Which is chaotic good character does what is necessary to bring about change for the better.
John: And then disdains bureaucratic organizations, which seem like yes, but places a high value on personal freedom.
John: Well, yes.
John: Okay.
John: So it's right in between chaotic good and neutral good.
John: I'm sure there are people who listen to the show who have long ago written up like character sheets for us both.
John: Oh, boy.
John: So maybe there's going to be some argument over on Gary's van about what our alignments actually are.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: But that's you don't have to listen.
Merlin: Well, no, no.
Merlin: I think it's one of those things like being a poet or a thought leader where you may be a poet, you may be a thought leader, but you're not allowed to self-declare.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You have to have been called—well, the way that my poetry teacher used to say it was, you're writing verse, and then other people can decide whether or not you're a poet, which I think that's a good distinction.
Merlin: In this case, should other people have to pick your alignment based on how you actually act rather than who you think you are?
Merlin: Because you have an aspirational alignment.
John: Well, you know, when I was saying, like, oh, I'm an INF whatever—
John: Uh-huh.
John: Yeah.
John: Some, oh, it was Dan Benjamin that was like, no, you're not.
John: And I was like, huh, what?
John: And he was like, no, no, no.
John: And then he gave, he told me exactly what he thought my, my Myers-Briggs was.
John: And I read the description and I was like, that could, you could not be more wrong.
John: And he's like, nope, that's what you are.
John: And he was so certain about it.
Merlin: Maybe that's his Myers alignment.
Merlin: I believe it is.
Merlin: He's that kind of alignment where he tells people incorrectly what their alignment is.
Merlin: I believe that's right.
John: But that kind of introduced me to the fact that online there are going to be a lot of people more invested in this cosmology than us that already have.
John: Or maybe they didn't realize they had a sense of it, but now they're going to tell us and maybe even cite some earlier episodes.
John: One of the interesting things, not to make everything about the war in Ukraine, but I'm realizing, you know, I've always felt part of why I've always been sort of, I don't know, like a military fetishist is that I had that childlike sense that the way wars got won
John: is that somebody in a tuxedo lit their cigarette with a pack of matches and then threw it over their shoulder into a bunch of bombs and they all went off.
John: There comes David Niven with his briefcase and his beret.
John: And in fact, at least watching the commentary on the war in Ukraine, I'm realizing that what wins wars is dungeon masters who are boring.
John: Right?
John: The dungeon masters that are rolling the dice and moving things around.
John: Not the storytelling types.
John: Not the storytellers.
Merlin: So you're DM, and we'll just use that term, game master.
John: Oh, I'm sorry, DM.
John: Oh, Jesus.
John: No, it's master that you don't want to use.
John: You can't say game master.
John: It has to be game friend.
Merlin: So you're the game slave, is the point.
Merlin: Yeah, cruise director.
Merlin: Can your master have an alignment as well?
Merlin: Will that affect the game?
Merlin: Oh, well, I think that's a very post-Higelian idea.
John: All United States military officers are lawful good, they think.
John: And I think they are in general, because I think the military trains you to be lawful good.
John: That's the whole thing.
John: The whole point of boot camp is like you're going to be lawful whether you like it or not.
John: Yeah.
John: And ultimately, we think we're good.
John: And so we, you know, so we act as though we're good.
John: And whether or not we are good or not kind of depends on what politicians are doing.
John: But in general, if somebody in the U.S.
John: military does something that's evil, they generally get caught and busted.
John: Like the system itself.
John: Like the William Calley type situation?
John: Yeah.
John: There's no part of the system that's like, well, you know what?
John: Just do what you want.
John: Like that's not in it at all.
John: And if you talk to officers and you listen to the way they think –
John: They think they're doing good and they have a lot of principle.
John: Interesting.
John: As opposed to, you know, what we're seeing in the Russian army, which is there's a lot more like... They're chaotic and competent.
John: Yeah, they're... Exactly.
John: It's like... Okay, I'm going to write that one down.
Merlin: It's like... See, now you've introduced... Z-axis number one has entered the chat.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: A fourth axis.
John: How did you do it?
John: You found one.
Merlin: I think I may have a lot more.
Merlin: I think it's critically important, though, to look at the – well, think about this when you say stuff like, oh, you know, I'm a punk rock guy and I'm really into, you know, anarchy.
Merlin: It's like, are you sure you're into anarchy?
Merlin: Because, like, if you walked out of your mom's house and got jumped, you'd be bummed and call the cops.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's why I, in that sense, that's why I say alignment is something other people think about you.
Merlin: When you say lawful, it isn't just, like, whether you regard yourself in terms of your self...
Merlin: um self-assessment as being that but do you think do you think you should follow the order that everybody else has made yes because that's pretty different from like i'm really good at like like you know the guys who shoot videos in their oakley blades at the at the target parking lot they probably think of themselves i mean let me give you your alignment johnny you know i'm saying i spent a week with a guy uh who was a u.s army captain
John: And he was in his thirties and he was lawful, good, incompetent.
John: And I met a lot of people in the military who were lawful, good, competent.
John: That this is an additional Merlin.
John: No, I'm with you.
John: I'm totally with you.
John: And spending a week with this guy who was lawful, good, incompetent was maybe was going to turn me into chaotic evil.
John: Just being around a person who was lawful and good, but completely incompetent.
John: Like not a good planner?
John: Well, it was just like he just didn't understand how he could not look forward into time, but also he did not understand...
John: Anything he didn't, he had risen, he had gone to college, uh, which in, you know, in some of my estimation, strike one, and then he had, he matriculated into the officer corps out of college.
John: So in this case, strike two, and then he had, he had Murphy's lawed himself up to the rank of captain.
Okay.
John: He's never going to get promoted.
John: He really did.
John: Right.
John: There's no there's no no lieutenant colonel is ever going to put him in to be promoted to major.
Merlin: And for your previous discussion, very interesting discussion last week about the ability to or whenever it was about delivering pallets of water.
Merlin: It's that we might be able to find a role for you where, let's be honest, you do the least damage.
Merlin: And the stuff, is there stuff that we can put you on that's going to be commensurate with your ability to like, you know, fuck up a steel truck.
John: Right.
John: And that was why he was giving me a tour for a week.
John: Like, this is a captain in the army that's got nothing better to do.
John: Nothing better to do.
John: Than just walk me through airports.
John: And I was like...
John: What's funny is what you want in a situation where you're the army and you've got to walk some civilian through stuff.
John: You want to make a good impression.
John: You want your funny guy there at that job.
John: But that funny guy is busy.
John: That funny captain is busy doing more important work with somebody more important.
John: This could be...
Merlin: Forgive me for a throwback here, but God, I love this actor.
Merlin: I love this character.
Merlin: Maybe kind of like Fred Willard in Spinal Tap, where he's like the tour guide on the Air Force Base.
Merlin: I know my hair's a little bit long right now.
Merlin: I might be mistaken for somebody in the band.
Merlin: That's good stuff.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of what you're talking about, though?
John: It is.
Merlin: You could be a tour guide, but I wouldn't want you to be the guy that makes sure that all the safeties are on.
John: Yeah.
John: Don't even give him a...
John: a globe master full of water pallets.
John: Cause he's going to, cause one thing's going to happen.
John: The tire's going to blow and he's going to lose it.
John: He's not going to, this guy.
John: So what ended up happening was a lot of times we'd go into a situation on a military base and I would have to like put my hand on his chest and go, I'll handle this.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: Because he was just like, like an office space when they say lead, follow, or get out of the way, you know, you're not supposed to get out of the way.
Yeah.
John: Or, or that's your career, right?
John: Like he's wherever he is right now, he's either retired or he is still a captain.
John: Yeah.
John: Sorry, idiocracy, not office space.
John: What am I thinking?
John: Idiocracy.
John: Watching the war in Ukraine get talked about online.
John: And of course it's, it's who I'm following, but also they are, this, this handful of people is becoming a new celebrity class of military, military commentator.
John: And it just makes you realize.
Merlin: And they all look like the Muppets and the Eagle.
John: Don't they?
John: A little bit, yeah.
John: The retired guys especially.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: The guys whose phones keep ringing through the whole interview.
Merlin: They figured out how to turn it off.
John: But I think what they're seeing is at the level of the people actually doing the fighting, like the sergeants and below who are actually shooting their guns,
John: You have to actually empower them to make decisions and to be a little bit, to be flexible.
Merlin: Marines are like Rottweilers.
Merlin: They always follow your orders exactly, except for the times when they know they should be doing something different.
John: And hopefully if you, if you have a good army, that's how you have empowered them.
John: And hopefully those, those young lieutenants,
Merlin: are lawful good enough yeah and then it's good enough sorry i know that's not what you meant to say but lawful good enough might be neutral good enough neutral good enough right yes yes that's another axis
John: You know, enough or too much, right?
John: You got too much down here, enough up there or not enough, right?
John: It's not enough to too much.
John: And then enough is right in the middle.
John: You could be neutral, neutral, neutral enough.
John: Chaotic milk hotel.
John: But then as you move up through the ranks, I feel like you've got to get more and more competent and more and more lawful maybe, and less and less like, uh,
John: Sort of what?
John: Wiggly, right?
John: Like if somebody throws a grenade into your foxhole, you've got a trolley problem.
John: Oh, sure.
John: How you solve the trolley problem is a matter of a split second.
John: Right.
John: And there's no, you know, if it's a thing where you throw yourself on the grenade.
John: That's when you find out who the real Captain America is.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Right.
John: I mean, there was a, there was a video of some, of some Ukrainian guys just throwing grenades over the top of a, of a seven foot wall.
John: And what, and there are a couple of Russian dudes hiding under a van and the, the grenade like bounces once and goes under the van.
John: And you see this arm come out with the grenade and huck it and just basically hucks it over to a group of his
John: This fellow soldier blows them all up.
John: Oh, no.
John: And it's just like, okay, trolley problem.
Merlin: Did a fellow did that?
John: No, no, no.
John: A Russian dude was hiding under the van.
John: He returned a grenade.
John: Yeah, he threw it back in the direction in which it came, except it came over an eight-foot wall, and he just kind of hucked it along the ground.
John: And he was just like, get this grenade out of here.
John: But he didn't reflect on the fact that six of his friends were standing between the van and the wall.
John: And that is somewhere on the not good... Not good enough.
John: Not good enough, right?
John: Not competent.
John: And also...
John: In a flexible situation.
Merlin: I don't think there's... People are always doing these Myers-Briggs or what was the other one?
Merlin: There's two big ones.
Merlin: There's Myers-Briggs and then there's that other one, you know, where you develop these things like, oh, I'm such an intuitive... Yeah, what is that?
Merlin: But this might be way more useful in an office context.
Merlin: Well, it has to be, right?
John: Yes.
Merlin: Because we're talking... But somebody else gets to fill out your sheet.
John: Well, yeah, or maybe all your co-workers and then they come to an agreement and then you can... You're a halfling water wrangler is good enough.
John: What we're doing is we're taking...
John: We're three-dimensionalizing D&D alignments until it becomes like a snowflake Christmas ornament.
John: It's a three-dimensional Sputnik ornament.
Merlin: Oh, it's not a real snowflake, but in some ways it's more detailed in a way that's useful.
Merlin: And we'll just keep adding new axes to this.
Merlin: I mean, to call it an axis at this point.
Merlin: There might be 45 different things we don't tell you about.
Merlin: We've got this on file for you.
Merlin: back at the home office, we know we are updating the things we need to know about your place within the party, if you like.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Exactly.
John: Or in any organization.
John: We're shooting arrows through an orange, but eventually it ends up being, what is it?
John: It's like one of those floating minds...
John: In the ocean or maybe it's, um, it, it, it's starting to look submarine mine.
John: Yeah.
John: Like submarine mine, or it's starting to look like the AIDS virus a little bit.
John: Like it's a little spiky ball.
Merlin: Corona, Corona, but you know, sorry, I'm interrupting.
Merlin: I, but there's, this is my brain is swimming right now.
Merlin: Can I, can I offer you just one thing here?
Merlin: And again, this might be, I'll let you decide because you're the, uh, you're the master, but like, I don't know if this is included in our admonition about contacting us.
Merlin: I imagine it is.
Merlin: But, like, well, and second of all, this will be turning into a podcast where we just talk about D&D and things that we don't really know about.
Merlin: But here's the other part of this, and this is where I think I can problematize this a little bit.
Merlin: We don't have time or scope today to go into...
Merlin: Was the term abilities?
Merlin: Like you've got your strength, wisdom, charisma, all those kinds of things.
Merlin: There is the aspect of all of those kinds of things.
Merlin: Like to be a good leader, you have to have high charisma.
Merlin: Like to be a certain character class, to be a fighter, you have to have pretty good strength usually, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: So there's all of those things in addition to alignment.
Merlin: You've also got, like I say, like what's your, what's the term they use?
Merlin: Like what's your breed?
Merlin: You know, are you a, are you an elf?
Merlin: No, like, are you a, what do they call that?
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Your race.
Merlin: Yeah, your species.
Merlin: But, like, I think we could, if we're not careful, accidentally shade over into that.
Merlin: But another solution, given that this is now a D&D podcast, is that what if there's actually, like, 78 abilities?
Merlin: And there's sub-abilities.
Merlin: Sub-abilities.
Merlin: What if we're working on D&D, advanced D&D, like we're doing like edition 12 and you just don't know it yet.
Merlin: And it's really, because really, again, but this follows that same trajectory as the Gary Gygax box set, which used to be like...
Merlin: it's not like you're playing fred you're playing orange team or whatever you know and it's really closer to laser tag than storytelling right but like what if we keep what if we follow that grand trajectory of of the uh of the of the post tsr uh era and we say like what are the well we have as many abilities as we need paper's cheap like we got a lot of places where we can pile this stuff up and we'll tell you what your species is don't worry about that i guess the question is
John: Because we were encountering this with lawful good, chaotic good.
John: Well, and competence.
John: I mean, it's competence and equality, or is that an alignment?
John: At a certain point, and this is the military thing, if what you're talking about is getting this box to there...
John: does a 75 charisma and a 25 strength.
John: Yeah.
John: Get that box from there.
John: That's a nice.
John: Get that box from here to there.
Merlin: Put all that 18 shit behind you.
Merlin: It's on a hundred scale.
Merlin: I've got 196 incompetence.
John: But if you're just trying to get that box from there to there, does 75 charisma, 25 strength get that box from there to there ultimately in an organizational context faster than if you had a 90 strength and a 20% charisma?
Merlin: Let's go back to Steve Rogers.
Merlin: Steve Rogers in his – no spoilers, but before Stanley Tucci gives him the serum, the super soldier serum –
Merlin: Think about that guy.
Merlin: You know, he could do this all day.
Merlin: Steve Rogers, he's game for a fight.
Merlin: He'll do it all day.
Merlin: I could do this all day, he says.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: He, his strengths, and I'm just, this is off the dome, but generally you say three to 18 would be strength.
Merlin: I'm going to say Steve Rogers from Brooklyn has probably a strength of maybe six or seven.
John: Hmm.
John: Barely.
Merlin: But yeah, right.
Merlin: He's a little skinny fella.
Merlin: But he whatever that ability is that maybe he's got he's got a 17 in gumption.
Merlin: Gumption.
Merlin: Stick to it.
Merlin: Could that be an ability?
Merlin: Well, it is a focus.
Merlin: Is he easily distracted?
Merlin: Is he courageous?
John: Is he a great man?
John: You see that he's his claws are scuttling across the ocean floor.
John: What you see, I think, in nation states is a lot of times people, especially online.
John: But I think that is reflective of of commentariat is they say, oh, you know, that group of people isn't really like you see it with with with countries to get American aid.
John: Like, oh, well, they couldn't really fight unless they had the USA behind them.
John: They couldn't fight at this level of strength.
John: And the answer to that is, yeah, but getting the U.S.
John: to aid you to that degree is a kind of strength.
John: You know, like there are a lot of nations in the world that aren't funded by the United States and don't have.
Merlin: So persuasiveness might have gone under the aegis of charisma up till now, but we're not afraid to break that out in our sheets.
Merlin: Which is really more of a booklet, at least.
John: There are all these people that feel like, well, they're tanks against these tanks, but they had air support.
John: And it's like, well, having air support is a thing.
John: You can't just judge nations on like, well, how well do their tanks do?
Merlin: This very much seems to spin out of your new understanding of the importance of the water bottle men.
Merlin: That is still an important... I mean, it sounds asinine to even say this now.
Merlin: But that's really important.
Merlin: It's not just the person who's in charge of delivering switchblade drones.
Merlin: It's people who are keeping the whole thing running and making sure, do you have the right tires?
Merlin: How many times will we come back to this?
Merlin: Because if you couldn't acquire the right tires and keep them maintained, it doesn't matter how strong everybody is.
John: One of the things I've noticed about following between five and ten of the members of this military operation
John: Retired commentariat on the war is that a lot of these guys have displayed their particular kind of fragility in terms of interacting with an online community.
Okay.
Merlin: You're talking here about the commentary at retired general types that get flustered talking to civilians?
John: Yeah, because there were a couple of people that really early on seemed to have some inside scoop on stuff.
John: And they got a lot of attention like, oh my God, who are you?
John: Why do you have this?
John: This is incredible.
John: The stuff you're giving out is exactly what everybody's hungering for.
John: And what happened to them was...
John: is we see it.
John: We've seen it a lot online over time.
John: They suddenly had a lot of attention.
John: And really, they just had...
Merlin: some upfront stuff you know they had like stuff that was really good i i didn't i this is yes and this is a type a type it was a type i'm not gonna name any names but you know this was a type for former prosecutors and just the lawyer class during the whole trump you know especially the impeachment stuff there are people who built a whole career it's true to some extent in covid
Merlin: Like, there's people that I happen to really like in the COVID world who are Debbie Downers, like I am.
Merlin: Debbie's Downer, like I am.
Merlin: And, like, their job kind of goes away whenever people stop caring about COVID in a way where they can even, like, scare those folks.
Merlin: And, again, I tend to agree with the Lena Wenz of the world.
Merlin: I'm all about that.
Merlin: But there's people that work at my wife's university who have made a whole career out of these.
Merlin: Like, speaking of, like, don't you have something else to do?
Merlin: If you leave the medical school, do you have time for a 30-tweet thread?
Merlin: about masks right now?
Merlin: Don't you have people who need stuff?
Merlin: Yeah, right.
John: Shouldn't you be typing?
John: Oh, I guess you are.
Merlin: Yeah, or like doing a titration or something.
John: There were a couple of people that when they reached the extent of what they had to offer, they'd also gone from 3,000 followers to 300,000 followers.
John: Which exposes you to a whole new class of ding-a-ling.
John: But they really wanted to keep that energy.
John: And so they started, here's what they did.
John: They ran out of inside information and they started offering commentary.
John: And what they were really good at was inside information.
John: And what they were not good at was commentary.
John: So you're following these people and they've been giving you this like morphine drip of here's what, you know, here's what the guy at the FSB that I happen to know somehow is telling me.
Merlin: You already gave the best example of this, John, in my opinion, which was the person who's able to go, hey, look, you know, I've done this stuff for a pretty long time.
Merlin: I'm looking at this satellite shot.
Merlin: And I think you phrased it some way along the lines of like, I know what I should be seeing for this thing to be true.
Merlin: And I know what I'm not seeing.
Merlin: And there's no way that they are prepared for this.
Merlin: Like, you know, if somebody who's like looked at these all day or even like a summary of these, like for their whole career can look down and go, uh...
John: You know, really?
John: Right.
John: There should be this many more of these things at this location than I see.
John: And that is... Which are facts based on their experience.
Merlin: But that's a damn sight away from... And therefore, here's my second and third order speculation about what's going to happen.
John: And a lot of them go to war with some other faction.
John: You know, there was a guy that decided that Reuters was a...
John: uh, was like a, uh, Putin collaborator.
John: The news service?
John: Yeah.
John: And, and, and so all of a sudden his tweets are just like all about, he's just like, the world needs to know about Reuters.
John: Poor bastard got Twitter brain.
John: He did.
John: He got Twitter brain.
John: But then there are a couple of generals who, and, and like high ranking guys who had never had, who had, who had been on Twitter for a long time.
John: And all they'd ever gotten back from people was, thank you, sir.
John: You know, your commentary on this is really enlightening.
John: Thank you, sir.
John: They love being there for their service.
John: They love.
John: They do.
John: And all of a sudden, they're getting people that are like, well, you don't know shit.
John: You know, my grandfather or Russian bots or whatever.
John: And a couple of them.
John: did a little Twitter freak out.
Merlin: Right on main, though.
Merlin: That's the crazy thing.
Merlin: Because then you have to go, I'm going to do a quote tweet and make this guy look like an idiot.
Merlin: And then all my flying monkeys are going to show up and say, please be more respectful of the general, sir.
Merlin: You're an idiot.
Merlin: And then they gang up.
Merlin: But that makes you look like such a piece of shit.
Merlin: Your smallest argument will be exploded into your largest misstep if you come off as an ignorant bully.
Wow.
John: And it was, it was, it was sad because you, you understand completely what's happening to them.
John: There's some, there's some troll who's 24 years old and is just like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.
John: And all of a dude, a guy that looks like Jonah from Veep.
John: He's got a four star general somewhere.
John: Who's like,
John: Well, that's, what are you talking about?
John: Like, that's a hundred percent wrong.
John: And then they go back and forth and you're just like general, general, general.
John: No, no, no.
John: This is the thing we've all experienced.
John: Don't do this.
John: And you look at his character alignment and he's got, he's so strong.
John: He's so competent.
John: He's so charismatic.
John: And then all of a sudden you see that there is like this.
John: There's this little blind spot that they have where it turns out they only have a 20% resilience to criticism.
Merlin: John, to follow the metaphor, maybe that, just for the sake of argument, let's say it's the general versus Jonah or whomever.
Merlin: And maybe it turns out Jonah has cast an enchantment on the general.
Merlin: And now because of his Twitter brain, now he's carrying a grudge online.
Merlin: Which is really not, like when he was 56th in his class at West Point, really not how he was expecting life to turn out.
John: No, I believe you, Merlin.
John: It's a spell.
John: It's not a problem of character.
John: It's susceptibility to spell.
John: And like all spells, you don't know you've had a spell cast on you.
John: Wow.
John: I've had so many spells cast on me.
John: I'm writing this down.
John: This could be a whole month for us.
Merlin: Spells and enchantment is going to be a whole series for us.
John: All of my personal fragility to certain spells and enchantments, certain kinds of spell and enchantment.
John: I'm so... I do not have... For whatever my magic user powers are, I don't have... I always roll poorly when it comes to protection from spells.
Merlin: And this has to be covered on your sheet, or at least the secret sheet...
Merlin: that the primary game person behind the screen is maintaining is like, oh, isn't that interesting?
Merlin: In the same way that I would notice if you got shot in the neck and maybe you're a little sensitive about neck stuff, like I can see now that you've been repeatedly enchanted or spelled and you didn't realize it.
Merlin: And it seems to have had some ongoing chronic effect on your judgment.
Merlin: That's going to change some numbers.
John: It's going to move some numbers.
John: Yes, absolutely.
John: Judgment.
John: I'm writing that.
John: And I, you know, I walk out into the world all the time and it's like, you want to hit me with a broom?
John: Hit me with a broom.
John: You can hit me all day with a broom.
John: I don't care.
John: And then somebody's like, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle with a little, you know, with an enchantment.
Merlin: Were you just doing Elizabeth Montgomery?
John: From Be Wished?
John: Tick-a-tick-a-tick.
John: Yeah, a little... She twitches her nose a little bit?
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And then all of a sudden, I'm standing there swinging a broom around in circles going, stop yelling at me!
John: And it's like, whoa, what happened?
John: What happened to him?
John: He was invulnerable a second ago.
John: Swinging wildly in a circle at people who aren't there.
John: Just nobody's there.
John: General's really come a long way, hasn't he?
John: Why are you yelling at me?
John: Stop sending me these mails.
Merlin: Oh, for me, like I have the, my, my game teller behind the screen definitely has some marks for, I have very little, I don't know what this is about my abilities, my alignment or my species, but I have very little resistance to the feeling that I'm being deliberately misunderstood.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, I know.
Merlin: I'm enough of a grown man that that should not bother me, but it really, it sometimes gets under my skin and that's a vulnerability.
Merlin: I'm going to, I'm good.
Merlin: I get like a minus four on buck up.
John: I yelled at you one time.
John: You, you were going through a phase where every time you would tell me something, you would conclude by saying, does that make sense?
John: Yeah.
John: And I was like, Merlin, that's just for self-preservation.
John: I know.
John: I was like, Merlin, that really offends me because I feel like the implication is that what you're saying is too complicated for me to understand.
John: No, no.
Merlin: But I have a plus four broom and I'm swinging it.
John: And you said to me, even then you were like, no, no, no.
John: It's just out of a total fear and desire not to ever be understood.
John: Yeah.
John: Or misunderstood.
John: Misunderstood, yeah.
John: And I was like, oh, well, I don't ever feel like you're misunderstood.
John: And you were like, no, no, no, that's the worst.
John: Like being misunderstood.
Merlin: Because we both are given our characters in our two-person party that we've had for coming up on over 11 years, I guess.
Merlin: Our two-person party.
John: Well, just on this show, but think about when we started.
John: We're coming up on 20 years, my friend.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: I don't love that.
Merlin: Hakuna Matata.
Merlin: That feels great.
John: I still have a t-shirt I stole from you 20 years ago from the San Francisco Muni.
John: You gave it to me because I needed a shirt for some reason.
John: Really?
Merlin: Do you have my Minutemen shirt?
John: No, I wouldn't wear a Minutemen shirt.
Merlin: Okay, well...
Merlin: Or I'm swinging my broom at you, but also like most of the people whom I love and revere and respect in life, including myself and you, I think we are both big fans of context.
Merlin: And perhaps another thing that gets written down on the sheet is you can totally needle this fella.
Merlin: If you leave out some context that they regard as important.
Merlin: So I might have 45 pieces of context and one, like first level opinion about something.
Merlin: And like, to me, the context ends up being so much more important than the opinion.
Merlin: And if you present the opinion without the context, which Twitter is made for, it makes you crazy.
Merlin: And now you've got, you've got plus five Twitter brain.
John: I feel like you and I and most of the people that I respect believe that the context is the opinion.
John: Oh, I'm a regular McLuhan over here.
John: Right.
John: Once you put the context down, the opinion is foreordained.
Merlin: Well, and this is also why you should never talk to cops.
Merlin: One of the many reasons you should never talk to a cop is that, you know, and again, I tell my kid this constantly and like, oh God, I had a cop experience last week that was unbelievable.
Merlin: It's finally, oh, fully cemented my idea that anyway, but, but where you're like, okay, look, here's the problem.
Merlin: Whatever, no matter what happens, this is a little bit of a side, side quest, but like a cop, there's no way anything you ever say is going to help you with a cop.
Merlin: Unless, of course, you can just say, like, well, you know, you say you're looking for this particular person, blah, blah, blah, here's my ID, da, da, da, da.
Merlin: But at least according to the YouTube videos I've watched, and I've watched a lot, if you say anything, even if it's true, every single thing you say to a cop will be used to make your life more difficult.
Merlin: No matter what, they're never going to say, oh, oh, so you didn't run the stop sign or you didn't abduct the baby.
Merlin: You can go.
Merlin: It's never going to happen.
Merlin: And that's the thing.
Merlin: It's like, of course, I'm a talker.
Merlin: And like context is everything.
Merlin: How soon can I talk to my lawyer is the only thing that you should ever say.
John: What's crazy is that I seek out cops to talk to.
John: And that's probably just a difference.
John: Is it an alignment issue?
John: It's an alignment issue, I think.
John: But like, if I see a cop standing there and nobody's talking to them, I will cross the street to talk to them.
John: You're Travis Bickle.
John: Okay.
John: I'm just like, hey, what's going on?
John: What are you looking at?
John: What's your day like?
John: Just because I want to get inside cop head and I want to, you know, like,
John: Like, ah, there's this, I remember I was walking outside of London, just walking through some fields, and I heard a gunshot in the distance.
Merlin: Just one rifle shot.
Merlin: And there's not that, well, I guess there's civilian guns, but they're mostly for hunting.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And I was like, huh, that's interesting.
John: But it was, you know, I was out, there was rolling hills type of thing, but not that far from London.
John: So I'm walking along for a while.
John: Here comes a police car.
John: No, not sirens on, just kind of trolling.
John: But it's full of Bobbies.
John: And these Bobbies show up, and they're wearing their little checkerboard hats.
John: Did they say, what's all this then?
John: And they said, by any chance, did you hear a gunshot?
John: And I said, well, as a matter of fact, I did.
John: And as an American, let me tell you.
John: And I started.
John: You take out your walking stick that turns into a chair.
John: I did.
John: I sat down and I said, here's what kind of rifle.
John: Here's your jingle stick that's also a seat.
John: It was.
John: It was.
John: Lean in on the car, you know.
John: Here's what caliber I think it was.
John: And here's where I think it came from.
John: But I was triangulating.
John: You know, I think it might have echoed after that.
John: Your portable whiteboard.
John: And they're looking at me and they, you know, they didn't know I was an American until I started talking.
John: And they've got this look on their face like, wow, an American is gunsplaining to us.
John: And we're just trying to figure out.
John: Somebody called it in or 50 people called it in.
Merlin: There's a cop fooling over an English person here and they talk about how you get free eyeglasses for 35 minutes.
John: Have you seen a tin of biscuits lately?
John: Did you see a lorry full of torches?
Yeah.
John: But I just, you know, they couldn't get me to, they couldn't get away from me.
John: They were like, all right, then thank you.
John: And I'm like, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait.
John: There's another thing I wanted to say.
John: Here's what I think about English gun law.
Merlin: And they're just like, right, right, right, right, turn up the light.
Merlin: They give you a phone number that doesn't actually go anywhere.
John: As they drove off, you know, I hooked my thumbs into my suspenders and I was like, well, you know, straightened out those old boys.
John: So in that case, you were a little bit of a bard.
John: Yeah, I was a little bit of a, I was telling him a story.
John: I plucked a few cords on my loot and said, let me tell you a story about the gunshots I heard.
John: But I will do that with cops around here.
John: The cops sit right outside my house because I'm on a corner and they hide their cop cars behind a bush.
John: and uh and and pull people over for oh you might just go go bring bring a tin of biscuits oh i walk i walk over and say well how's it going and i don't know any of them by name but i know them all you know i can recognize most of them and i'm just like well you know get them speeders am i right
John: But, uh, but so, so the whole, like, don't talk to cops thing.
John: It just goes right over my head.
John: I'm like, oh, wow.
John: That's how you're wired.
John: Yeah.
John: Why would you not talk to cops?
John: They're fascinating.
John: It's like talking to sports people.
John: And I'm sure there are a lot of people that are like, don't talk to sports people.
Merlin: Let's use your father's nomenclature.
Merlin: The gal who came out to adjudicate when the son of the neighbor called the cops.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: She sounds like the way, I mean, I could be getting this wrong, but the way you described her, I felt like you kind of admired the way that she handled it.
Merlin: She's like a small statured person.
Merlin: It was like, hey, I'm just here to talk to everybody and get all the stories.
Merlin: But non-threatening.
John: de-escalating behavior super de-escalating both trained to do it you could see but also instinctively knew that she had a strong personality and de-escalation was the only path for unlike my cop who kept saying what do you want me to do yeah that's not good what do you want me to do what are you talking about you could check the fact that his tabs expired two years ago oh oh i did i had one of those i found a guy's wallet
John: Somebody, you know, some, somebody locally that was running a landscaping company had obviously put his wallet on top of his truck and then driven off because the wall was sitting in the middle of the street.
John: Oh man.
John: And I found it and it had money in it and it had his business license and all this stuff.
John: And I looked it up on my phone.
John: And it was, like, his company was a shell company owned by a shell company owned by his brother-in-law owned by somebody.
Merlin: I dropped a thread there.
Merlin: You think this was a landscaper?
Merlin: Like, somebody's got, like, a trailer with lawnmowers and stuff?
John: Yeah, because I looked up his name, and it was associated with, like, you know, Jim's Landscaping LLCs.
John: Yes, yes, yes.
John: And I called a couple of numbers in Tacoma, where all these businesses were based, and they all were deadlines.
Hmm.
John: And I was like, oh, you know, like this guy, two days on that.
John: He needs his wallet.
John: It's got a bunch of money in it.
John: It's got all his stuff.
John: And you could tell he was a, he was a, uh, he was Hispanic and you just knew like, this is one inconvenience that this guy does not need today.
John: Absolutely.
John: To have also then lost his wallet.
John: It's never a good day to lose your wallet.
John: Right.
John: So I said, you know what?
John: This is a good opportunity to see how long, if I drive around the neighborhood, how long until I run into a cop.
John: And so I got in my car, I put the wallet on the dashboard, and I just started driving around at 15 miles an hour, just driving up and down the streets.
John: How long until I see a cop?
John: Like, this is a good experiment.
John: Well, I drive around and it isn't 10 minutes before I see a cop.
John: There's one up on the road.
John: So I get up and I get behind the cop, but we're on a busy road now.
John: And so I'm driving behind him and I'm like, all right, I'm behind the cop.
John: Uh, what do I do?
John: Flash my lights at him.
John: Pull him over.
John: I'm not sure.
John: Exactly.
John: Like what a honk, honk, honk.
John: Run up next to him and like, Hey, Hey.
John: So I just follow him.
John: I'm like, I'm just following the cop now.
John: And we drive up, we stop at a stoplight.
John: I'm like, you're kind of like, uh, you're doing your own ride along.
John: Doing a ride along.
John: Yeah.
John: Eventually he kind of, he takes a left-hand turn next to the, uh, next to the lumber yard and
John: And I make the left hand turn with him and I start flashing my lights at him.
John: Well, so he pulls over and I pull over and he gets out and he's definitely got that.
John: Which is exactly what all black men do.
John: Well, and he's a black cop, right?
John: Okay.
John: Ooh, that's a twist.
John: All right.
John: Black cop.
John: And he's, you know, and he's, and he's big, he's muscular and he gets out and he's got the cop attitude of like, how may I help you citizen?
John: Yeah.
John: That whole thing.
John: Like what, what, what's this all about?
John: Yeah.
John: And I'm like, and my attitude immediately is like, if somebody's flashing their brights behind you and you pull over, you could cut a little bit of the like, what's this all about attitude out?
John: Like, you know, come over and say, how may I help you?
John: And so I explained the thing.
John: I've got this wallet.
John: It was a guy.
John: And he says, well, I don't know what to do.
John: You know, go online and see what you can find.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: This is like my cup.
John: And I said, well, no, I know what to do.
John: Find a cop and give the wallet to the policeman who has all the technology and ability to find somebody.
John: Right.
John: Because if you pulled this guy over.
John: I hope it isn't used to serve a bench warrant or something.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: But if you pulled him over and he showed you this stuff, he handed you this wallet, you're not going to shrug and go, well, guess there's no way to find this guy.
John: Like you can run all the deets, right?
John: Yes.
John: And he goes, ugh.
John: And kind of like change for a dollar.
John: Oh my God.
John: You're so, you know, frustrating or whatever.
John: And I was like, no, seriously.
John: Yeah.
John: Like what, what am I taking you away from dude?
John: Like take the wallet.
John: And he goes, okay.
John: And he opens up the back of his car and, and, and takes the wallet and puts it in like an evidence box and says, you know, I'll take it down to city hall or whatever and see.
John: And I was like, okay.
Okay.
John: You do your cop thing, but, like, you could also just go enter it into your computer and find the guy's phone number and call him.
John: Like, wow.
John: Say, is there any chance you lost a wallet?
John: Can you describe it?
John: Like, lost wallet?
Merlin: I mean, you know, firemen are pulling cats down out of trees.
Merlin: But it's a kind of social...
Merlin: I don't exactly know if I'm using that right, but like an escrow for the house is like, okay, it goes into this account that like it sits in situ and nobody has access to it except under certain conditions.
Merlin: It strikes me.
Merlin: And again, this is my kind of like pre-adulthood idea of a cop being somebody who's mostly there to help you is, is like, you're going to be a kind of social escrow.
Merlin: I give this to you and I can trust that it will get to the person that it needs to get to and
John: As he closed the trunk, I had this sudden vision of a hundred ounce silver bar sitting in a drawer in the Renton Police Department for a year while I walked around thinking that the people... Remember how he'd open the door by putting his butt up with his hip?
John: Yeah.
John: That guy, like for however long that was, nine months from here.
Merlin: It just never came up, John, that all of your belongings had been found months ago.
Merlin: It never came up.
John: They had my passport and my driver's license.
John: It was calling to you in a box, but it was because a cop had pulled, you know, arrested a different guy for a stolen car.
John: And it just put all this in a box.
John: And for all I know, this poor guy's wallet is still sitting in a box.
Merlin: And probably like me last week at a certain point, then I flipped into the mode.
Merlin: I'm not going to talk about what happened because for a lot of reasons, but like there's a situation that's been happening.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And like, you know, it was one of those things where suffice to say five different neighbors were all out at the same time with this nuisance situation saying, I've seen that too.
Merlin: I've seen that too.
Merlin: I've seen this person like hit cars.
Merlin: I've seen this.
Merlin: And we were being actively threatened by this person.
Merlin: Were they a unicyclist?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Perhaps.
Merlin: And anyway, my first attempt to contact an actual cop, they said, you got to call the non-emergency number.
Merlin: I said, no problem.
Merlin: I've got the non-emergency number on my phone.
Merlin: And you see cops every day.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I'm very near a cop place.
Merlin: And so I called the non-emergency number.
Merlin: This is around noon or one.
Merlin: And a non-emergency cop did not show up until sundown.
Merlin: And when we did, I got a lecture about the nature of modern policing and what this cop is and is not allowed to do.
Merlin: And do you want to go citizens arrest that person?
Merlin: And I said, no, this person, I've seen this person hit two different cars and they have tabs that expire two years ago.
Merlin: Is there nothing you can do to go like...
Merlin: just go deal with this person who just threatened my wife and me and all these other people and just about hit a motorcyclist.
Merlin: I said, finally, I just, I was ready to cry because I finally said, look, I don't want, the reason I haven't contacted you about this person, any of us for a year, is we don't want to get this person in trouble, but what they're doing is escalating in extremity and is very dangerous and I don't want anybody to get hurt.
Merlin: And then I got a lecture.
Merlin: He pointed to his body camera and said, well, we got this and this is all.
Merlin: And like, what do you want me to do?
Merlin: And at that point, throw back to you, I just went into my, man, you know what?
Merlin: Gosh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I totally understand.
Merlin: And I went into my like, now it's just going to be a question of hopefully I won't get arrested.
Merlin: And like, well, because you never know.
Merlin: Like, it's the weirdest fucking thing in the world how these guys operate.
Merlin: And like, do they just send out this one guy who's very, very, he's very slick and he's very, obviously a veteran of his job.
Merlin: And I think there might be people that they send out to jobs to make it go away is what I think.
John: It's definitely, you know, this is the, this is the thing in America, right?
John: Where everybody feels besieged and the cops feel besieged.
John: Sure.
John: And they're all, yeah, but they're also trying to, you know, they're sitting in their duty room and they're going, okay, well, black lives matter does this, that, and the other, and it's all against the cops and nobody appreciates us.
John: And then they're in San Francisco where there is this, you know, what you're talking about is, is a,
John: Is a very San Francisco kind of problem.
John: Seattle has it, too, which is this person is a danger, but we know there are no mental health facilities anymore.
John: And we know that there is a cycle of putting people.
John: Right.
John: We know there's there's a cycle of putting people into jails and that's not a solution.
Merlin: Yeah, the war is kind of a revolving door.
Merlin: Like, we don't have a solution for this, so we just keep passing you through the same kernel of corn goes through the digestive system over and over.
John: Exactly.
John: And so we all know that.
John: We're all informed, and we're all educated about it, and we know that this is the problem.
John: But also, there's a person that is hitting people, and it's a problem.
John: And so there isn't yet a system other than the cops.
John: Like you can't, you know, if you called like a social service hotline, they're not going to send anybody out either.
Merlin: There are things, like as it happens, one of my neighbors is an EMT who works in the Tenderloin.
Merlin: And there is a Tenderloin, I don't know how much you've kept up with the Tenderloin lately, but...
Merlin: And probably, John, it's gotten way, way worse.
Merlin: And so they send out in a cool way, like, and who knows, this is probably the worst kind of bureaucracy.
Merlin: But when they send people out now, they send out an EMT and like a social, kind of like when we say defund the police, what we really mean is don't have the cops have to fix every problem with somebody passed out in a doorway with shit in their pants.
Merlin: And so they send out this like three, at least three person team.
Merlin: And my neighbor and friend, the EMT was like, don't, don't ever bother to call the cops.
Merlin: They just, they just don't come.
Merlin: And when they do come, they'll, you got to get a lecture just like you just got.
John: But you know, the, the, the problem is I think that the, if the cop did arrest him, he'd take him downtown.
John: I didn't even want him to be arrested though.
John: Or just like, just like what?
John: I mean, the thing is, if he gives the guy a lecture, the guy's not going to listen.
John: The guy is going to like, not going to do anything.
John: Right.
John: He's not like my mom putting raccoons and taking them out into the suburbs and dropping them off.
John: Go be free.
John: You know, and then in the court system, these guys stand there in the court.
John: The judge is just like, get these guys out of my court.
John: There's nothing I can.
John: The jails are full.
John: There's nothing I can do.
John: And the whole thing just cost the city $25,000.
John: Yeah, it's true.
Merlin: And then the guys back out on the street and maybe with a hot lunch, but... For the way that it ended when I'd finally gotten through my third act of like, oh my gosh, thank you for your service.
Merlin: Oh my gosh, it must be really hard to have to be accountable for what you do.
Merlin: And it ended with, hey, look, you know, what do you want me to do?
Merlin: Do you want to go citizens arrest him?
Merlin: And I said, no, I just don't want him to hurt anybody.
Merlin: He says, hey, listen, next time you see him hit someone, just call 911.
Merlin: I was like, oh, that's really a good idea.
Merlin: I'll do that.
Merlin: So like when somebody on an e-bike coming up the hill with their kid on the back of the bike gets hit by this guy because of things I can't even really get into, except that this guy is actively menacingly doing.
Merlin: Swinging a boat paddle, swinging a broom.
Merlin: He lives in a car and doesn't want to be seen in a car.
Merlin: So he covers all of his windows with those shades and he drives that way.
John: Oh, dear.
Merlin: He drives.
John: Oh, dear.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I've seen him hit numerous things.
Merlin: And this was just the day that he got out and started screaming at the person on a motorcycle he almost killed.
Merlin: And everybody in the neighborhood went out and like, this guy again?
Merlin: It's like, I don't know what the answer is, but guess what?
Merlin: It's above my pay grade.
Merlin: I'm not trying to get anybody arrested.
Merlin: I never said a goddamn peep about this guy in the one year that he has lived outside of our house in a car because I don't want to get him in trouble.
Merlin: And I don't want to be a dick.
Merlin: Because it never became a problem until now.
Merlin: The incredible creepiness of this guy only became a problem at the point when everybody in the neighborhood, and let's, okay, one detail.
Merlin: Yes, I do live near a police station.
Merlin: And completely independently, three different households were all in the police station at the same time.
Merlin: Saying, look, can you do anything about this?
Merlin: Completely coincidentally?
Merlin: Well, because people up and down the block, every single person has a story about this guy.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: And at the point when he's threatening my wife and me, and at the point when he's threatening them, he's fucking swinging at the fences.
Merlin: And I now have enough history with this gentleman to know that something's escalating.
Merlin: And anyway, like, I guess if I went and checked all the, you know, all the codicils, I would know exactly what to give me a 35B.
Merlin: Like, I don't know what to ask for.
Merlin: But if this person really harms somebody, in addition to, like, wrecking somebody's car, like, somebody with a camera who is in a new world of policing is going to have to deal with it.
Merlin: And that might mean that somebody, as Joe Biden says, doesn't come home for dinner that night.
Merlin: Isn't there anything you'd want to do to intercede with this person who is a public safety risk right now?
John: I think this is exactly one of the places where the conservative America and liberal America both are playing whack-a-mole.
John: Conservative America wants everybody to go to, you know, get busted by the cops and liberal America wants everybody to get the treatment they need.
John: But both of those things are whack-a-mole because the solution is somewhere way, way higher, funded at a very different level, a whole different take.
John: And both conservatives and liberals, I think, think that they understand what the high-level take it is that they need.
John: But there's a high-level take that neither group and no one in America is talking about.
John: That is, what do we do with vulnerable populations that have no resources that nobody wants to take responsibility for?
John: Right.
John: There's no line item for getting that squared away.
John: Because cops and EMTs are the wrong people and social workers are also the wrong people.
John: They're just whack-a-mole too, you know, because they live in a world where they're like, well, housing, if we can get them housing, then that solves a problem.
John: But it doesn't solve a mental illness problem.
John: It doesn't solve a problem of a lot of people don't want housing.
John: It doesn't solve a lot of problems.
John: I mean, housing is a problem.
John: I wouldn't want to be in a shelter.
John: I'd rather be in a tent than a shelter any day.
John: And putting somebody in jail and putting somebody in housing, you'd rather have them have housing, but it's not a solution to like an overarching American and modern problem of like, there are always going to be people that aren't able to
John: can get into whatever the system is and there are more and more people getting bounced out all the time what do we do and that's everything we're describing here involves i like what you said though about like there's that's not any particular person's job by the time it reaches that level of intervention from somebody that's not the job of any of those people yeah they're just at both sides conservative and liberal are just cycling people through
John: And they put them out one side and they go, well, they went through drug treatment and they've got their medication.
John: Good luck.
John: And then, you know, then they come back through, you know, a couple of months later and we've got all these academics that are writing papers on Hegel and nobody, you know, but we've kind of in academia eliminated like the, the social, social psychology as a theoretical, uh, like disciplines.
John: Social psychology is, you know, it's churning out people to go into this sort of practical whack-a-mole.
John: Oh, it's very focused on the practical component.
John: Yeah, but, you know, in the 18th and 19th century, there were all these theories, right?
John: Theories of prisons and theories of society that now we look back at and go, oh, urgh.
John: That's, you know, when that's colonialist or that's like a Foucault or like a panopticon kind of.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: But so many theories of how to manage.
John: society that came up against this American idea that democracy and personal freedom, A, can coexist and B, are the highest form.
Merlin: And I was reading something- And they're all aftermarket add-ons.
Merlin: Like there's nothing, there's never a good day to just say, let's restart society and take all this into account.
Merlin: So whether it's my neighbor, the EMT, or whether it's the social worker, or whether it's in fact the guy in the car, like every single one of those is an exception rather than a rule.
Merlin: And the system does not, systems, I should say, like don't have a place for integrating that into being something that we want to take care of on a more long-term thought through even academic level.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, people are like standing up and getting thrown off of airplanes because they don't want to be told to wear a mask.
John: Nobody in America right now is going to sign off on.
John: Well, there are some people that need to be involuntarily hospitalized and we have to have systems in place where those are humane systems, but there's just no other way to deal with this problem other than that there be at least somewhere a small, but fully operating and humane.
John: And, and if, if we can even put the word on it, loving way to take,
John: chronic people who are never going to be well.
John: And, you know, and the, and the dirty word that we use is warehousing, but there's a kind way to, um,
John: To say there are just a certain number of people that are never going to be well.
John: There's no amount of counseling.
John: There's no amount of drug treatment.
John: There's no amount of God that is ever going to make them able to live in San Francisco.
John: And to continue to try and make either A, make San Francisco a place they can live or B, make them someone who can live in San Francisco.
John: That's just whack-a-mole on both sides.
John: And, you know, and the liberals are like, well, we need to make San Francisco a place where they can live.
John: And the conservatives are like, we need to make them different.
Merlin: Or like, is it, was it Ron?
Merlin: Who was it?
Merlin: No, was it Abbott or DeSantis?
Merlin: One of the governors, like, drove a bunch of, God, I'm going to get this wrong, but took it the general gist.
Merlin: I think it was, I want to say it was Abbott, took a bunch of people who come over the border, and I believe in buses drove them to Washington State.
John: which is pretty clever, but I'm also thinking the other day about in the 1970s or early eighties of the mayor of Chicago, who was the first female mayor of a major city in America.
John: She actually moved into Cabrini green housing project saying, I'm going to live in the housing project.
John: In order to, you know.
John: Really understand.
John: Really understand and see what can be done.
John: And she lived there for a couple of months and was like, nope.
John: Oh, a thousand percent.
Merlin: Yeah, well, as well as my ex used to say, you can't choose to join the proletariat.
John: Yeah, right, right, right.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: But like maybe instead of drug tests and sobriety tests, we should be giving alignment tests.
Merlin: Maybe if we put some more efforts into that, we could gauge your abilities.
Merlin: Maybe not your species.
Merlin: I think that's profiling.
Merlin: Like we're not going to just pull over every halfling because they're speeding.
John: I read this crazy thing the other day.
John: Not crazy, but it struck me as crazy.
John: And it was one of these Ukraine writers who was breaking down the history of Crimea.
John: And they were saying that during the Ottoman Empire, when the Ottomans were like a fairly autocratic empire,
John: Crimea was a democracy.
John: Hmm.
John: But what the, what they were saying is at the time democracy was considered a primitive and like, uh,
John: like a lesser sort of tribal form of government.
Merlin: The only people that would... Again, now I'm being that guy from Twitter, but not a republic, but a true representative.
John: A democracy, yeah.
John: The kind that we in America have decided through our experiment is the highest form, is the final form of government.
Merlin: That was seen as like retrograde primitive...
John: Yeah.
John: It was like, oh, they haven't even risen to the level where they have people that are capable of making decisions.
John: If everybody votes.
John: Exactly.
John: They're just like living like a tribe, like, oh, everybody gets a vote.
John: And it was like this lightning bolt to me to understand that, yeah, democracy has been around for 2000 years and nobody chose it, not because they weren't an enlightened civilization, but because they thought of it as a tribal form of government.
John: And that all the subsequent forms of government were considered advancements on it.
John: And it wasn't until the United States of America, which admittedly at the time.
Merlin: At least the age of enlightenment that they returned to that idea.
John: Right.
John: But those were, they were coming at it from a kind of like, well, now we're all beautiful and smart, but the United States was just a collection of tribes at the time.
John: Right.
John: I mean, how many people even were there in America?
Right.
John: Not any more than there were Tartars in Crimea.
John: And the idea of like, oh, well, everybody gets a vote.
John: It was so, I think through, through the lens of the enlightenment, it turned into this, this lofty ideal, but, but it's not like history has not concluded with democracy as the, as its final resolution of the question.
John: It's just it's been in play the whole time.
Merlin: And also, as you like to remind us, a 200 and something year experiment and a 200 and something year experiment here.
John: Right.
John: Not to say that I think that we should become an autocracy that I lead.
John: Although.
John: Oh, are you dropping a hanky?
John: If, if somebody, if some podcast listenership decided, you know what, we're going to rise up.
John: We're going to be the, the nucleus of a new, of a new alignment, a new alignment.
Merlin: Welcome to the new alignment.
Merlin: Welcome to the new alignment.
Merlin: Oh man.
Merlin: That's a very advanced form of government, John.
John: That's what I'm thinking.
Merlin: What do you want me to do?
Oh,