This week, Merlin and John talk about:
The Problem: We’re all compressed into the same cattle chute, referring to how in airports you are all the same, no matter what status or privileges you have, everybody has to go through that TSA line and will have a similar experience.
The show title refers to the possible name for a political Center Party in America, the C-party, or the Gentleman’s B-Party.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
John having a cold from changing weather conditions (RL114)
It is pretty early! John was up in the high desert for a few days and he came back to the low coastal swamps and last night he woke himself up sneezing in the middle of the night and he sneezed so hard he pulled a muscle in his chest that he didn’t even remember he had. Welcome to the 40s! For the past week his nose has been as dry as the Sonoran Desert. Other than that, he feels amazing!
Merlin got more allergies as he has gotten older. He used to have a friend who had really bad allergies and she would always bemoan when it was a nice day because of the high pressure, it would wreak havoc, and Merlin would think that is insane and she was obviously a crazy person. There is no such thing as being allergic to grass and high pressure systems! What is wrong with you? And now as soon as the weather gets nice Merlin wakes up in the morning and he pulls muscles!
Going to the skating rink in 6th grade (RL114)
John has not been roller skating for a long time, but it just came up in conversation. When he was in 6th grade there was no cooler thing to go do than go to the roller rink. That was his first experience with clubbing. For a 6th grader that is going to the club and all the cool kids are there and some of the kids are there unchaperoned and kids skating around who know how to do the skating things, and the girls are there.
For Merlin the Congress Skating Rink on Congress Street was absolutely the center of the action. It was like going to the disco in Saturday Night Fever. It was the thing everybody talked about all week. Merlin went there twice and he felt completely out of his depth and he just played Qix the whole time, it is a hell of a game.
John was both younger than his ostensible peers and also less mature at the age where girls started to really be interested in boys, which was a long time before boys seemed to reciprocate that interest, although that might have been his maturity. There were definitely kids there that were making out and engaging in boy/girl activities, but John was so immature that his response to it was just to skate right up to two kids who were clearly about to neck and go: ”Hahahaha!” He was such a dork!
John did not understand this new kind of hate that someone could feel for a person, which was: ”I was just about to kiss that person and you skated up to me and said: ’Kiss Army! Uaaaaah’!” These were John’s peers and friends in school, they were the same class, the same grade, but John was fully two years late, maturity wise. I was was oblivious, he was still a little kid, and they were listening to Blondie, things were happening, people were feeling feelings, but John was not feeling feelings, he was feeling only the thrill of the speed of the wind in his hair and the pure adrenaline panic of not understanding what was going on with his friends.
Kids who behave outrageously because they haven’t been taught the proper rules (RL114)
Pretty much for all of his life Merlin felt like there was a manual that he didn't receive, some kind of after school class that everybody was getting on how to be a person. How do you guys understand what this system is? How do you understand how to navigate in the system? It is a fucked-up system, but girls did understand that there was a system and what their place in it could be better than a lot of guys and earlier, but back then it was completely inscrutable. It was a very lonely experience of feeling: ”There is no library book that I could get that would help me explain how to not just even find a girl who want to kiss me, but to fit in at the most basic!” He felt completely invisible at a place like that.
There was a girl in John’s class in 7th grade who was super bright and super funny and he felt a kinship with her, but then the story went around that she not only was drinking alcohol, but drinking it before school. Later on he knew her well when they got to be adults and understood that she had a terrible family life and was drinking before 7th grade. This is Alaska, and a lot of otherwise normal kids were huffing paint and drinking before school and going out to their car to do Whippits in between class that they had shoplifted just to black out the…
There is a base level of trauma happening in Alaska among Alaska youth in the 1970s that probably isn’t true anywhere outside of West Virginia. The adults up there were not running the show the way that you would. It was a frontier mentality. A lot of people were up there making a ton of money during the oil boom, and they were irresponsible people to begin with. They were oil workers, not people that have a lot of impulse control to begin with.
You are seeing this happen in Edmonton, Canada now and around the world. What happens in these frontier situations is that people who are very working class wrench-turners and derrick-workers are suddenly elevated just through cash alone into the firmly upper middle class resources. People are coming from Oklahoma, they are coming from Arkansas, they are coming from Louisiana, and they have been working on the oil derricks down there and they come to Alaska and their pay is quadrupled.
They don't have any roots up there either and the nature of the country is: ”Anything goes!” You get a massive influx of sex workers, a massive influx of drug people. Everybody is up there and there is money everywhere. This happened over and over and over again in Alaska because the fishing went crazy, it is a gold rush mentality. A lot of these people had kids and they weren't looking out for their kids and the drugs and the sex and the violence was all happening all around this generation of kids that came of age between 1970 and 1985. There was so much intensity and the adults were so checked out!
They were also working a lot too, two weeks on, two weeks off, so dad is just fully gone and when he comes back his pockets are full of cash, he is raging, it is a very nutty life. John’s family was relatively stable by comparison. He would hear this story about: ”Yeah, What's-her-butt is coming to class drunk!” and the story goes around, but people aren't telling it like that is a reason for concern, but they are telling that story because that makes her incredibly cool: ”Did you know that A gets drunk before school?” - ”What? Whoa!” - ”Yeah, I know! Cool, right?” This was happening among John’s friends and that put the manual so much further out of his reach! He has had a beer, but he wasn't intentionally getting drunk yet.
There is a huge divide between people who were like: ”Tihi, I am going to have a beer and a half while we drive around a car!” versus people who would plan ahead to have alcohol and get drunk on more than a quarterly basis. The only reason you would be doing that is that you are trying to put X's where your eyes are, because whatever else is happening is way worse. There was a lot of that going on, and then the sex that attended that. John was honestly still worried about whether the Agents of Cobra were going to succeed in their plot to capture GI Joe.
Even in Merlin’s daughter’s kindergarten there are certain kids that are aggressive, certainly little boys her age. There are some kids who have some stuff going on, and then there are some kids who are dicks. It is amazing how many of the kids in Merlin’s daughter's kindergarten class were actually really like nice, cool kids with parents and they are a pain in the ass, but they are like pretty normal kids, so it really does stick out. It is a pretty diverse class. It really does stick out when there is somebody who is always getting in trouble because of a combination of not just impulse control but also lashing out.
There was one little boy that she was friends with who was a really sweet kid and everything would be going fine, but he would suddenly become pretty aggressive, then become violent, and then burst into tears. One day he hit her with a shovel and they are really good friends. Then he would just burst into tears, the kid is 3-4 years old! Merlin has to read on that personally, and he doesn't know how to translate it, but he wants to tell her: ”Well, that kid has got some stuff going on, probably! When you meet people who do stuff that seems outrageous or are allowed to do stuff that seems outrageous or you see them behaving in a way that is very outrageous, that may not be just because they have cool parents that let them do what they want!
Almost every bully you meet got that way for a reason, because somebody bullied them and it might be their dad, it might be their brother or their mom, but that kid may not have the happiest home life and school may be the place where they are trying to figure out…” How do you explain that to a five year old? ”Why did your friend hit you with a shovel?” - ”Well, his dad is a little hard to talk to sometimes!”
Watching the little kids interact with each other at school and then extrapolating that to watching the adults that John knows and then just trying to live in the world, it is hard to keep those two thoughts in mind: Everyone in the world is simultaneously less monstrous than you want them to be or less monstrous than you think, everybody is doing the best job they can and everybody has a fairly similar toolbox and people are generally good. We are probably more alike than we would imagine.
People in the South are amazing and they spend a lot of time in the North demonizing them and then you go down there and you realize that these are the most amazing people in the world. It is true around the world, everybody is generally great and everybody is smarter than you think and better at what they are doing than you think. Then on the flip side, how do we manage even to have one day of peace in the world? John was saying this a few episodes ago (see RL110): How do people drive to a job Downtown and don't get in a fist fight every day? The friction that you have with other people every day and just knowing how many people are really on a limb every day and barely keeping it together.
John’s daughter’s little preschool draws from a fairly affluent subset of the Capitol Hill population and there are a couple of kids who have beautiful homes and obviously educated, caring parents, but those kids are out of control because the parenting choices are mostly: ”Boy, I don't know what to do about it, so I am just going to give him a candy bar and set them in front of the television and half an hour from now he will calm down. I guess that is what parenting is!”
Over time that kid will become socialized by his peers and by the world and by school so that he can go out into the world and get a job, he can go to college, all these things will happen, but at the core of this person there is no relationship to other people. The core relationship, which is: ”My mom and dad didn't let me be an animal!” never happened and the kid is insulated because they have wealth, so he is in this big house and nobody can hear him. He is not bothering people on the subway.
There was an exposé going around about CEOs of startups in their 20s who are racist frat boys, that is happening in a lot of places. The resources allow the person to grow up with a good vocabulary, a good education, they have a lot of friends, they have a cool car, they are popular and successful, they succeed, but at the heart of their experience there is something crucial missioning. They weren't domesticated! ”When you get tired in this giant room full of toys, why don't you go into your other giant room full of toys? Or why don't you scroll through 1000 videos you could watch?”
Take another hit off of the crack pipe and then literally something is wrong with you, let’s go to the doctor and get some medicine! Why do you have trouble sitting still when you are expected to not do the thing you immediately want to do for 5 minutes? You must have a disorder! Let's put a pill in you.
Then you see other kids at the school whose parents don't seem strict to John. Maybe when he was a kid he watched other people's parents and was like: ”Wow, that is a strict parent!”, but there are parents that go to the co-op preschool that his daughter goes to who are just watching their kid and when the kid hits another kid with a shovel the parent is on them instantly and not angry, but the parent is there, saying: ”I see you! This is not good! You are done!” That kid at the center of their existence is something. There is some feeling that somebody that loves them is watching them, for better or for worse.
John did a bunch of traveling last week, and everywhere you go there are people everywhere, and they are all making it work somehow in this fractal way of: Every single person is paying their water bill this month, every single person manages to put gas in their car, but yesterday John was on an airplane and he kept hearing this clacking sound, and he looked across the aisle and there was a woman cutting her fingernails, and she surely would have been clipping her toenails if she didn't feel like there was some line. She is not a monster, but she does have something missing in her, not that no-one ever told her, she is a woman in her 40s or 50s!
All those people that reply to John when he says: ”Don't wear sweatpants on an airplane!” - ”They are comfortable!” Yeah, it is comfortable for her, she needs to get this done, but as we loosen certain restrictions in order to have new, exciting freedoms, we draw the curtain back on a lot of people who were only being held in the pack by the rules. John is continually astonished that we manage as people, and that alone is all the proof he needs, all the faith that he need in his life: It continues to happen, we are managing, and if you zoom in or zoom out too far, it all looks insane, so the solution is: ”Don't do that!” - ”Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” - ”Well, don't do that!” That is a weird place for somebody like John to arrive because he wants to zoom in and zoom out, he wants to find the place where it hurts and poke it, poke it, poke it!
Every kid has an innate and slightly flawed sense of justice. If there are five kids at a party and only four of those kids got a slice of cake, somebody screwed up and that actually is not fair. In Merlin’s kid’s school there are really super mixed signals about whether it is okay to have sugar there. They got all these lectures about how you can never have sugar at school, but even the teachers bring cookies sometimes, which is fine, but that becomes a mixed message that is about a lot more than sugar, because if a little kid consistently sees something that is at odds with what we said it would be, that is the original confusion, if it doesn't square in that way.
Merlin’s mom worked so hard and tried so hard to give him what she could and to keep him from not becoming a reprobate, but of course he envied the boys who were like the Nelson Muntz kids, whose parents didn't care where they were. He envied them so much, he thought they were so cool, and the girls who in some cases had some pretty clouded judgment about how to be spending their time, it seemed magical to him. How do you get into that group? Now he is so glad that he wasn't.
When feathered hair was introduced to the world there seemed to be people with effortlessly feathered hair, and the Venn diagram of those people and the cool kids who were getting drunk before school overlapped a lot. Right up until feathering hair became universal and everyone had a giant comb sticking out of their back pocket John’s mom was still cutting his hair with a ruler and and she would go to Sears and buy him outfits that matched. ”Well, this is a blue and orange Velour V-neck sweatshirt top, so we should have some blue and orange striped pants. This is an orange and yellow striped baseball shirt. We should have some orange jeans!”
John looked like an ice cream cone, like a Sherbet experiment, and he was perfectly comfortable in those outfits because his mom had picked them, they couldn't be wrong, but also his favorite color was orange and he had orange jeans on, what other criteria would a person have? If your favorite color was orange and you could have orange jeans, why would you not? Then he walked through these giant doors into teenagerdom, leaving aside the orange jeans for a second, just the fact that his hair looked like a motorcycle helmet and all these kids with this hair that really looked like feathers!
It is basically the haircut that every member of Creedence Clearwater Revival has! John’s mom didn't not know how to cut hair, she cut it as well as it needed to be cut. It is John’s attitude about the child, too. It is a child! Why the hell would you give a child a cool haircut? Because the child is a toy to you? Practically a kid needs no cool haircut. Also the Jiro Dreams of Sushi model: Your child should work in your sushi restaurant their entire life until you die and then they will take over the sushi restaurant. That is the premise!
John is not worried about explaining the consistency of the adult world to his kid. They have established with her that there are restaurant rules, there are library rules, and there are home rules, and those rules are different. That doesn't need to be explained to you. You know that when we are in a restaurant, restaurant rules apply. Those are different than house rules. Just follow the restaurant rules! This is an uncomplicated way that they traverse the world. If they are in a restaurant and some kid across the restaurant isn't obeying restaurant rules, that is not our problem! She is very curious about it. What is that little boy doing? Why is he doing that? Well…
John is very comfortable communicating to her that this kind of unfairness is a part of existence. Her childhood justice, which is super-heightened and understood: Sometimes the teeth gets knocked out of your mouth, kid! We all would be just sucking on the tit all the time, but we are not. Sometimes other kids get ice cream cones, sometimes blankety blank.
For example, her mother is oblivious to her playing with ice in her cup at a restaurant. The waiter comes over, puts a pint glass of ice down in front of the kid, and immediately John is looking at the glass and he is looking at her. Her mother is not, she is is studying the menu, she is looking around, and the first thing that their daughter does is that she reaches her filthy little hand into what she sees as a fantastic ice water bucket that somebody put down here. All she needs is a shovel to begin having fun. And look, there is a giant spoon. She does have a shovel! Away she goes!
If you are not sitting there saying: ”Hey, guess what we don't do? We don't pull the ice out of our glass because you are a dumb little baby, first of all, you are going to pull that glass over on you and then you are going to be soaking wet. How many times does it have to happen before we just don't do it anymore?” But in her world there is the fundamental inconsistency of: When she is out to dinner with her mother by themselves she might be playing in her water glass the whole time, but when her father is there, then she is staring at him with her dark eyes, giving him the glare across the table: ”Why are you prohibiting me from doing what I want?” and then we have a new problem: ”You are glaring at Daddy, which is also not a thing that we do!”
She understands that the rules are different with Daddy, and they are not radically different. It is not like Daddy comes in and says: ”Before we eat, we all take off our clothes and sing Kumbaya!” and everyone in the restaurant is staring at us, but that is just what we do with Daddy. It is within the realm of normal, but the rules are different, and every person should understand that because otherwise you get situations where you are clipping your fucking nails on an airplane. The rules are different, but there are restaurant rules, there are airplane rules, and within a realm of variation.
For John the idea that you would take your shoes and socks off on an airplane and put your feet up on the bulkhead is off the reservation, it is outside of what anyone would call reasonable airplane rules, but John has a picture of himself sitting in first class next to a guy who took his shoes and socks off and put his feet up on the bulkhead. The flight attendants aren't going to say anything and here is this guy who has enough privilege that he is sitting here and he is taking it all the way, his comfort above all else.
Watching other kids and watching the way that their parents are there and loving and caring and have the resources and ability, but there is just that key little piece of attentiveness or attention or personal authority or understanding what their job is. Your job is not to give your kid a cool haircut and make sure that your kid ends up cool, because then your kid is going to be getting drunk before school, because that is the only way they are going to fill that hole. Your job is to say what the rules are and to make the kid feel loved as you take the glass of water away from them and say: ”We don't play with water at our table!”
People who strive for bigger and bigger things, even if they are already successful (RL114)
The only thing that Merlin finds more flummoxing than he found cute girls in tight pants when he was 13 is to look at people who really do make millions or a billion dollars, and then they move on to the next thing that is even bigger and they work even harder. Even some dingaling like Donald Trump: How many times has he made and lost and remade a fortune? Those kinds of people might as well be from another planet! Merlin is maybe just a half turn away from a lottery ticket person where if he had a company that made that kind of money he would try and do things like take care of college and settle his things, but mostly he would try to have more time to do stuff, and that seems like the last thing on some of these guys minds.
Some of that desire to do bigger and bigger things and more and more things is at the heart of John’s own problems. He went into a coffee shop the other day, and the guy behind the counter was a guy he knew, and he was like: ”Hey, man, how is it going?” - ”Great, man, how are you?” and they talked and he has a couple of kids, and he made John the most delicious espresso that he had in weeks, saying that as a guy sitting here drinking week-old coffee that he kept in the fridge while he was gone. John was standing out in front of the coffee shop talking to another friend, and he was like: ”I didn't know that this guy worked here at this cafe. I know him from around town!” - ”He has worked at this cafe since 1996!”
John was taken aback by it. He is the same age, he has got two kids, and in some crucial way he is practicing the art of espresso. This is a thing that happens in Seattle that predates the artisanal mustache world: They recognize espresso making as a craft, it was always a hipster world, but that thing alone was a world that you could go into with pride. The guy who started Stumptown Coffee came out of this particular cafe and the guys that owned it never had an interest in expanding and becoming a 20-chain thing. They were just into their place and they just make perfect coffee there. This cafe has a whole culture of people who go there, like a blast from the past, like it used to be before everything needed to become a thing, when it could just sit and be a little thing.
John was reflecting on the fact that he liked this guy, he did just make him a fantastic cup of coffee, but the idea of deciding at age 24 that you are going to be the world's greatest barista, or not even that, you are just going to try and be a better barista every day, and that a contentment could come into your life through that practice, and that you would not every day wake up and go: ”Why don't I own this cafe? Why don't I own the house across the street from this cafe so I can sit in that house and look out the window at my cafe? Why haven't I written a book about how to be a barista that is the biggest book ever about it?”
John’s ex girlfriends in the past have always criticized him for it: The outward expression of it always seems like: ”Oh, you just want to be a big wheel! You are not content to just sit and pull coffee, you want to be a big shot, you want to be the big wheel!” and that is an impure motivation. You should find contentment in just living a good life and all these things that people say: ”If you have a couple of good friends and a couple of Löwenbräu’s, boy, aren't you living!” But for John, at the core is a desire to: "Well, what are we doing here? If we are not moving the ball forward on what it means to be human, if we are not helping each other, if we are not making it easier for the next generation, if we are not trying to solve the problems that our fathers and mothers created?”
If we are not engaged in a life in pursuit of something that maybe we will never know, that ultimately is just that we one day send out a probe and it connects to extraterrestrial intelligence or who knows what the freaking purpose is, but if you are not pursuing it like there is a purpose, and John feels like he should be part of the advanced guard of that. Maybe the guy who is making espresso every day is fulfilling that purpose also, but John perceives his job to be as an explorer and as somebody who is trying to advance that ball.
It comes up against this thing that actually came up in the course of a Roderick's Rendezvous the other day. As he was free-talking, which is what he does at that show, he rolls his eyes back in his head until all you can see is the whites, and the he free-talks for half an hour, the secular version of Speaking in Tongues: ”Here is what I was thinking about today. I thought about some thoughts! Would you like to hear that about them?” John was reflecting on the fact that there are limits to human pain and also limits to human joy.
The way we can tell that there are limits to human pain is that if there were not, there are some people who have experienced so much pain in their life that it would make life impossible. How could you survive the Holocaust and then go on and live the rest of your life and live to be 90? How could you do it? There are people who have experienced such incredible trauma that if there wasn't a floor to the amount of pain we could experience, people would drop all the way through. There are people who do drop all the way through, there are suicides, there are all kinds of people who fall and keep falling, but for the most of us… we are talking about drug addicts hitting their bottom, but another way of looking at that bottom is that it is a blessed limit.
There is a floor to the amount of suffering that you can experience, and once you hit that floor… imagine losing your child, imagine losing your child where you are responsible somehow! You couldn't survive if there weren't a floor to the amount of suffering we can actually experience. Once you hit that bottom there is nowhere to go but up. We can survive these terrible things and we can continue on.
The flip-side of that is that there is a ceiling to the amount of joy that we can experience. What characterizes multimillionaires and billionaires is a constant trying to achieve an enjoyment of luxury or an enjoyment of success, but they have hit their ceiling and they keep buying luxury watches or they want all the furniture in their house to be made out of Ocelot fur, they are thinking: ”That is what I deserve. That is what is going to make me feel like better!” or whatever.
John has the good fortune periodically to stay at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, which is a shabby chic. The people take care of you, the food is fairly good, the rooms are comfortable. John realized a long time ago, sitting in that hotel: If you had so much money that you could stay at the Chateau Marmont any time you wanted and not think about it., that seems like a nice amount of money, that seems like a great resource. And yet there are people for whom the idea of staying in such a crappy place would be an insult to them.
John sees this in airports: If you are even in an airport, you are not in the top class of people anymore. You would be on your own jet or you would be in a charter jet, you would be in a different terminal. We are all compressed into the same cattle chute and people who are in double first class and who board early are just fooling themselves because they are going to have to go through that same TSA line. They might have pre-check, but there is a woman in pre-checking on a Rascal Scooter with her pants full of Beanie Babies now. There is no route through the airport that doesn't at some point or another end up with you and your Louis Vuitton luggage standing in line behind a guy who got his toenail clippers out and is ready!
The idea that there is a ceiling on pleasure… John’s relationship to capitalism is that unlimited wealth, unlimited opportunity, unlimited success is not unlimited, it is absolutely limited by the compression that is on our own experience, the similarity that we all have to one another, and the fact that past a certain amount of luxury, freedom, enjoyment, pleasure, there is no more! You cannot chase that Dragon any further! You cannot have any better sex than you have already had, and you cannot have any better sleep than you have already had! All of the rest of it is wasted effort, and misdirected resources. We are all sitting and watching these rich people arc across the sky and thinking: ”Wow, they must be having such an amazing white-hot experience!”, but they are sitting in a very comfortable chair and they have a hang nail, just like you have a hang nail, and they are paying somebody $1800 a week to take care of their nails.
Ultimately, that ceiling and that floor compresses what we can feel, and if we could just acknowledge that somehow and feel like: ”All right, you crossed the finish line, you are in pleasure time! Now, this is as good as it gets. We are not going to devote billions of dollars of our collective wealth to support your pursuit of more! We are going to channel that in a different direction, trying to raise the boat for some other people to get out of the swamps!” That is the logic of a socialist mentality, That is the logic of socialism: Once a certain percentage of people are up above the ceiling, then we turn our attention to all the people who are below the floor.
You look at pictures of Richard Branson who has his own island and he is out there with Mick Jagger and a bunch of 24 year old Virgin Airline stewardesses, and they are having jet ski races. The only reason you know that this is happening is that there are photographs of it and the only reason there are photographs of it is that Richard Branson hired somebody to stand waist-deep in the lukewarm ocean water and make sure that they documented this experience because Richard Branson doesn't believe that it exists unless it is photographed and publicized.
You see the look on his face, and he is a handsome guy who has got a lot of money, and he is having what we all think of as a peak experience. He is naked-jetskiing with Mick Jagger! But the look of rigor mortis on their faces is the look of somebody who does not know how to enjoy things, so you have to photograph it and the only enjoyment he is really getting is making sure that other people saw this. He seems like a monster, but not the worst kind. At least he is not using his wealth to make sure that people don't get (inaudible).
If Merlin could afford to buy an Island he would be doing some crazy shit that nobody could trace to him. You could afford to do stuff where it could never be traced back to you! Part of the fun would be that you are anonymous now and you are getting away with incredible shit and nobody can figure out it is you because you are hanging on with Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
The first thing you would do is buy a submarine, and the reason that doesn't happen more, and that is the underlying logic of all conspiracy theorists, is that all the rich people have in fact done that. They are running secret games from their private submarines. What you come up against is the threshold of people's imagination! John is picturing Seattle with the zip lines and the Gondolas installed (see RL87), and then some submarine-based public transit.
John’s High School girlfriend meeting her husband on the MUNI (RL114)
John’s high school girlfriend (Kelly Kiefer), the one that broke his heart, she is a doctor, her husband is a PhD, depending on whether you call them a doctor or not, but their meet-cute-story is that she was on the MUNI and was getting off at the stop that he was getting on, and he got on the MUNI (John said subway) and either she turned around and got back on the MUNI that she had just gotten off, or it was the other way around and she got off and he was about to get on and then he got off, it is a really creepy meet-cute, but they are married and they have two beautiful kids and life goes on for them.
The San Francisco cable cars being out of service because of contract negotiations (RL114)
There are 600 vehicles that are operating every given day in San Francisco, and it is a shit storm to begin with. If everything is running perfectly, it is still so not running perfectly. Some of the guys are a little unhappy about their current negotiations for their $32.50 an hour opening-pay job because they have to start paying for some of their own pension. These are guys who make $100,000 a year and live on golf courses and God bless them, they are doing great work, but two thirds of them did not show up on Monday and Tuesday.
It is called a sick out because they are contractually obligated to not do that. It is out of range for them, they are not allowed to strike, and they didn't like the way negotiations are going and so basically the city has been completely gutted, the cable car lines are down. If you brought your kid to San Francisco to ride the cable car, come back another time when the city is working!You get out to Merlin’s neighborhood, the train stops and turns around and goes back because they need it for other places and there is a bus that will show up, that will then take every single person that was on that train, shove them into one bus, and then maybe that will get all the way out to the Zoo. That is their last three days!
It is one thing to put up with a lot of poop on the streets, but they really need that system to work. If Merlin had his druthers they would not have a car at all. They do have a car because his wife works on the other side of town, so they ended up getting another car. He doesn't want to have a car, he doesn’t want to need a car, he doesn’t want to fucking park a car, and part of what makes his neighborhood cool is that he is lucky to be on one of the five… (Merlin interrupts himself and moves on)
Today they got on because he had to take his kid to the Zoo for camp, they got five stops from their house, had to get out because the train needed to go back, and then they stood there and waited. He felt like a George Costanza character. Where is my private island? We all live in a society here!
Public infrastructure falling apart because of the political system and the funding in America (RL114)
One of the problems is that you should not let the Liberals run things in a key way. America could have 15 political parties, America has two, and within those two political parties we try to put the whole constellation of feelings, luckily they are so vastly different in approach and philosophy and practical real politics that they really are two extremely stark choices (this was meant in an ironic way). The reason that they aren't is that the vast mass of people are right in the center and they pick left or right just based on who their parents were and just based on the kind of music they like or whatever. If there was a center party it would be the biggest party in the country by far. The C plus party. The gentleman's B party.
You need people who are sticklers to run a public transit system. You need to bring in some Swiss neutral apolitical people who are unemotional, but who have resources. You cannot run a public transit system where the people who are responsible for keeping it running don't have the resources to do it. The New York Public Library is trying to support itself because unlike its competition, private institutions and Library of Congress, it is supported by the people. There is a fascinating article in The New Yorker just recently: The New York Public Library sold one of its branch libraries to try and earn some money.
They sold the real estate to keep the library functioning and open. And they sold this building for $50 million in Midtown, and that $50 million went into the $300 million deficit that they were trying to resolve. The $50 million beautiful old library building was torn down by a developer who built a $500 million hotel apartment loft, the penthouse of which sold for $60 million. So the person who bought that $60 million penthouse could have just bought the old library and lived in it. If John was a fucking supervillain, that is what he would have done! He would have gone in and said: ”Hey, you guys, leave the books! I am buying the whole thing! Libraries, books, microfiche, everything!” He would live in a freaking library!
Whoever this person is paid $10 million more to live in an apartment that looks like a hotel room, that has only the finest finishes on everything, and it is just fucking garbage. Everything about it is garbage. Living there is to live in a place with no heart, and to live there is to be a person with no heart, and the person who bought that apartment doesn't even live there, they probably live in St. Petersburg or they probably live most of their life on Richard Branson's private island, and this is just the place that they come to blow people's minds when they are in New York.
It is the ultimate public institution, that building with the freaking lions out front that has served the citizens of New York for over 100 years, it has the collected knowledge of all of human history in it, and we are so screwed up right now that the sense that it is New York City's responsibility to keep that library completely funded, and that all of the billionaires that live there and all the money that is going through that city, that somehow that library would be in jeopardy because some tax bill didn't go through Albany the right way, and now all of a sudden some administrator at the library has to worry about fundraising all the time and Meanwhile, across the street, there is somebody buying a ring for his Ukrainian girlfriend that costs $30 million because Queen Elizabeth II once swallowed the stone and shat it out, like the special monkey poop coffee, except it is a yellow diamond, it wasn't yellow when it went in.
This is why John is starting to focus so much on local government. The state of California is so broken because of that fucking Proposition 13 or whatever the hell it is that the state of California passed, the thing from way back where they just basically gutted the funding of everything in the state, the tax revolt thing. The state of California basically eliminated its own power to tax and it is falling apart, and our country is falling apart, our infrastructure is falling apart, our public facilities are falling apart because we are collectively funneling our resources into all these guys who are designing apps for iPhones.
$1 billion would be a fantastic bequest to the New York Public Library. Why doesn't the New York Public Library have $1 billion in its coffers? Why would MUNI not be trying to expand and improve its service at every turn? Why are we not our own patrons? John doesn’t want a Prince of MUNI who goes. ”I hereby allow MUNI to keep operating because I am a Saint and I can no longer get pleasure out of my money, so I am going to turn it over to MUNI!”
Some things will not go the way you planned, no matter how much money you throw at them (RL114)
Merlin wishes somebody would write a book called Everything I Need to Know That I Learned Planning a Wedding because there are certain kinds of things in life, dealing with planning a wedding, and dealing with getting ready to have a baby are two really good examples of this: You might have the best ideas and the best intentions in the world, but no matter how you thought this out and no matter how many good ideas and how many good intentions and how much energy you have, it is all going to be ground up in the machinery of that process. How many people have said specifically to the DJ, the first question was: ”Are you going to talk over everybody? Are you going to do all this bullshit?” - ”No, I will make sure to play If You Leave (by OMD) at exactly this time!” and they don't and they get up there and they announce the fucking chicken song and the bride is weeping because they just spent $10,000 for this guy who didn't do a single thing they asked him to do.
Why? Because that is how it works! You can go in and say you want the pastries to be this way or you want these covers on the chairs or you think you can fix this, you can make this the wedding that you want by throwing money at it, but there will always be so much more money that you can throw at that and all it is going to do is be more money to go into the gaping maw of the wedding industry. Similar with having a kid: There are all these books and websites that will encourage you to have your birth planned and all these things that you want to do. You can engineer that as heavily as you want, but there is still so much stuff that just runs the way that it runs because that is the way that it runs!
Economics and capitalism does not take into consideration that natural resources are limited (RL141)
One of the fundamental problems with economics is that when people talk about economic models and the capitalist model. Our typical economic model does not take into consideration that natural resources are limited. If you have a company whose value is in oil extraction, the company is valued by the amount of money that they have invested in their machines, by the cost that is required to get the oil out of the ground and to process it and to ship it, and that is the cost of oil and that is why that company is worth money. What is not factored into that cost is that oil exists in a limited quantity, that we presumably collectively own it as residents of Earth, and that the oil has value intrinsically in the ground before it is moved. Who owns that value and how do we factor that in? We don't!
We don't think about the value of gold before it is extracted from the ground. The scarcity that is involved in gold is the scarcity that is a product of: ”Well, it is hard to find and it is hard to get out and transport around!”, but not that it has value where it lies. All economics ultimately is broken. It is a game that we are playing, it is a story that we are telling ourselves about how things work, but it is a completely false story. To begin any economic idea, you would have to say: ”Well, we are all on one planet and it is limited and we collectively own it. We have to!”
Unless you believe in an origin story where God says: ”Adam, you own it and your descendants get to divide it up!” you have to say: ”We are all on the planet, we collectively own it!” and all the games that we are playing about: ”I own this much of it and you own that much of it, and you don't own any of it!” are just games, they are just stories, and they are stories that have evolved because our understanding of where we came from used to be less complete. Back when it was: ”I don't know, the Earth is flat and I live on this part of it!” it made sense to say: ”This is mine! I found this first!” or whatever. But now to actually have a system you could call economics that made any sense at all, you would have to start completely over.
The idea of taxes, for instance, which we all spend all of our time bemoaning and thinking about and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they are just an idea that somebody had to try and solve a problem by apportioning resources that are largely fantasy in these different directions to try and resolve inequalities and perform functions. Taxes are not something natural. God did not invent them, and they are not in the Earth, taxes are a comedy which we have placed on top of a comedy, and the idea that we can look at the Earth and look at our cities and look at ourselves, we have to look through these comedies that we have written to describe how we got here, and instead say:
”Where are we? How do we apportion resources where we need them? How do we write a new story where we understand that this is a collective action? It is spaceship Earth and resources are limited and we now have the technology that we can move them around fairly effortlessly. How do we really want to do that? How do we do that in a way that would make sense to a child's sense of fairness? How do we do that in a way that takes into consideration that we do not want people living beneath the floor, and we are not particularly interested in people living this Dragon chasing existence because it is ludicrous!”
Taxes themselves are just a game to try and pry some resources away, to direct them to these collective actions. When you talk about collective action versus individual freedom, those are games, those are jokes, they are novels. The reality is: ”Here we all are! We are breathing the same air, and your individual rights and my desire to make progress that can only happen through collective action are just the tip of the iceberg!” Believing that those two things are antithetical to one another is just because we have such a limited imagination and we are so taken up by these stories that don't work anymore. They are great-great-great-grandfather stories, and they do not actually describe our world.
John still looking for a nice car, briefly thinking of buying a 1960s Cadillac in Santa Fe and driving it home (RL114)
John really wants a nice car, though, a nice big gas-guzzling truck. He was down in New Mexico and he saw a 1960s Cadillac on the Craigslist, and he thought: ”You know what? I am just going to fucking buy it! I am down here in Santa Fe. I am just going to buy this Cadillac. I am going to drive it home! That is me! That is how I do! I am down here, I am going to throw some cash at this 1960s Cadillac, and I am going to drive it home through the wilds of the west and when I get home, then I am going to be the guy in the Cadillac who drove it home from Santa Fe and that is going to be a great story!
This is my new origin story, my latest one! There are people that just fucking do what they want, and I am one of those, and I am going to be a badass and people are going to be like: ’What the what?’ and I am going to Instagram the whole trip and my legend is going to go through the roof! Look out! When I put out a record, a lot of people are going to talk about it and they are going to be like: ’That is the fucking guy that buys a Cadillac whenever he wants!’”
Merlin wonders what is taking John so long to buy one. The John thinks: ”That is a fucking dumb idea!” Sitting in that hotel room, his path changed. If he had gone the other way he wouldn't even be recording this podcast right now because he would be driving through the desert somewhere, and he would probably at some point stop answering questions posing in photos with children, he would get a turquoise belt buckle, it would be like the opening scene of show girls, there would be some girl outside of Las Vegas standing out there with her thumb out, and he would pull over and be like: ”What's up, baby? You want to get into my Instagram reality? You ready for this?” - ”I am a dancer, not a whore!”