Ep. 47: "Esquivalience"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, it's a little early.
It is early.
You're working these days.
Yeah, well, you know, as you know, I had a lot of house guests here for a couple of weeks.
I heard about that.
And I finally put the last one on a plane this morning.
You're kidding.
No.
So I'm just...
So I kind of woke up early just out of a feeling of that anxiety you have that someone's in my house and they're probably making bacon.
Yeah.
But no one was in my house.
Getting into your chili.
Someone's getting into my chili.
Someone's messing with my globes or taking pictures of my...
Candlesticks.
Putting snuffed out cigarettes in the garbage.
Yeah, snuffed out cigarettes in the garbage or eating different kinds of jerky than the canonical jerkies.
You know what I mean?
I do know exactly what you mean.
I don't know.
If memory serves, the friend, I believe the friend you sent out today has literally been there for almost two weeks.
He's been longer than that, three weeks.
You had a man in your house for three weeks.
Oh, my God.
And it's only because he walks around...
He walks around like a kitten on Christmas morning.
That's the only reason I could stand it.
He's very quiet.
He's extremely polite and he keeps to himself.
That's right.
You know, one of my house guests was handing out $15 iTunes cards.
I already cashed mine in.
John, I have mixed feelings on this.
We should cut all this out.
Should we actually say what we're talking about or should we just be oblique and annoy people?
I don't know.
It's nice to have mixed feelings.
I love mixed feelings.
I mean, sometimes.
Maybe we should allude to stuff more.
I don't know.
It could be interesting to talk about.
Okay, let's talk about it.
I agree.
So fucking Jonathan Colton has sat his narrow ass on your couch for three weeks.
He moved from bed to bed.
He moved from bed to couch to bed.
And now finally, finally gone.
I already regret saying this because because there's I mean, now this is Pandora's vagina has flung her lobby open.
Oh, no.
And there is so much to talk about now that I have officially, officially been to your house.
Yeah, I know.
But I mean, my God.
Oh, geez.
No, no, no.
All good.
All good.
It's just, you know, there's that, you know.
But you were here in the context of a larger group of people.
I was in the context, yeah.
You were here both in the context and out of the context.
And so it would be different if you were just here roaming around idly pulling books off the shelves, idly changing the settings on things.
I mean, that would be one thing, but it's another thing to be here in a room full of... I did not break your ukulele string.
It's not my fault.
It's another thing to be here in a group full of alpha males.
Okay, so this is going to be the official, I think, D-list star fuckery episode slash, more importantly, discussion, if we may, if you're comfortable, about exactly what happens in your house.
People have heard about it.
I'm going to ask them maybe, I don't know if you have a bell or something nearby.
You should have something that you can hit.
It's a safe word, a safe bell.
Hit a safe bell.
Okay, mine is red.
And you tell me when we need to cut it off.
Okay.
Yeah, well, as you say, we can just cut out all the weird stuff.
Can we just stipulate?
Now, again, there's a lot I don't know about how your perimeter is protected, but I will, to the best of my ability, reveal nothing about the location or the means by which I was or was not allowed into your home.
Right.
And anything that might allow my house to be identified from the air.
Okay.
Cut that out.
Okay.
All right.
I'll do the best I can.
Here's the thing.
There's something that we've all experienced.
My daughter is four and she's already experienced this, which is the whole like I had a dream and it was weird because it was our house but it wasn't our house.
And I say, shut up.
I hate hearing other people's dreams.
It's kind of a compulsion of mine.
Of course.
I hate it, too.
I had a professor who found it intolerable.
He found it.
It was like his greatest phobia.
I just I merely I merely hate it.
But he could not stand to hear someone else's dream.
Wow.
Really?
I'm David Dexter, the late David Dexter.
I'm behind you, buddy.
Well, you know what I do is I slowly lower my eyelids like I'm cranking the awning of a French cafe until my eyelids are just barely open.
Just the faintest touch of eye left.
This is why you're listening?
This is why I'm listening to someone talk about their dream.
I'm just like, I get this somnambulant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's, you know, I mean, there's a basic problem to the dreams.
Maybe we should just talk about dreams and avoid all this other bullshit.
But the dreams are very interesting, except in as much as they are absolutely not interesting.
They're not.
It's like describing a poop to somebody.
I would rather hear about the poop you took than your dream.
Because here's what it's going to sound like.
If everybody that talked to me about their dreams was really just describing their last poop, I would be actually pretty fascinated.
I would be so relieved.
That's something I can understand.
But here's how it goes.
You can go, oh, my God, I just remember something.
Oh, my God.
I had a crazy dream last night.
Oh, I hate you.
I hate you.
Please don't say anything.
Oh, no, no.
Let me just listen.
I want to make it clear.
I don't want to hear your dream.
It's not just you.
I never want to hear anybody fucking tell me their dream.
I don't care.
And it won't be as cool as you think it is.
And then toward the end, you'll drift off and say you couldn't really describe it.
That's what's going to happen.
That's how you describe it.
It was so funny because it was like I was in school, but it was a museum.
And it was like I was in a boat, but not.
And I remember that I had arms.
My eyes are lowering.
Yeah.
And you were there, but it wasn't you.
No!
Although I will make a caveat, or I will make an exception.
It's very early.
I don't know how to speak yet.
I'm really sorry.
It is early.
But I will make an exception for someone who tweets me about their dream.
Oh, see, okay.
Oh, right.
You were in my dream.
Let's explain why.
Because you've got 140 fucking characters.
There's no epilogue.
There's no prologue.
Excuse me.
There's no prologue and there's no epilogue.
You merely say, I had a weird dream last night that my pillows turned into John Roderick.
Weird.
Perfect.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Right?
So then it goes on.
You amble on through this thing.
And already, the thing is, I think, there's probably a poetic name for this, but every time we remember a memory, we change it a little bit and degrade it a little bit.
This is just pure neuroscience.
Well, degrade it and then amplify...
The things that we remember incorrectly.
Yeah.
If you go back, if you ever hear recordings of yourself or, you know, in my case, I go back and I hear myself because I repeat myself a lot.
I don't know if I ever mentioned that, but I'll hear myself having told the same story and it's different.
Like I'm always telling the best version I can remember of something that happened to me and it is different.
Right.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And so when you tell a dream, you're really telling a story of a dream and the story sucks.
And then you go into so finally as you're drifting.
And then I remember I woke up a little bit, but it was, you know, it's so hard to describe because it was.
Well, and that's true.
I can't describe my dreams because I stopped remembering my dreams a long time ago.
When I was when I was young, I remembered my dreams pretty lucidly.
My dreams were vivid and I remembered every – I still remember a dream I had when I was four years old in extraordinary detail.
But apart from that, I mean I have like five dreams that I remember ever.
Yeah.
Nowadays I wake up and it's like, oh, yeah, right.
I was in some warehouse in a winter landscape being chased by snipers and I was riding a motorcycle that I built myself.
That's a pretty fucking cool dream.
See, I love a cool dream or I love a dream with a punchline.
The thing is, if it really is your dream and you're not making it up, it probably won't have a punchline because it's just a bunch of bullshit your brain is trying to figure out.
It's like the recycling bin of your soul, right?
Now, you began this by trying to describe the experience of coming to my house.
And I'm guessing it is because you have dreamt about being in my house.
Can I tell you something?
I know you hate this.
Can I tell you this, Dream?
It was so weird.
No, here's the thing.
I got to your place.
I got to your perimeter.
I instantly identified it for reasons that I won't be able to explain.
Apart from the GPS, I was also able to see things that you have talked about.
You flung open the door of your home.
And immediately there were – it was as though you were fucking with my head that you had listened to our program, which I know you don't.
It was as though you had listened to our program and deliberately tried to make a house that it looked like John Roderick lived in.
Because if I may say, not too much detail, but I opened the door and right in front of me – Well, first, if I can correct you, you opened the gate to the garden.
I wasn't going to say, John.
Plausible deniability.
Chuck Colson.
Yeah.
Anyway, yes, the gate was the picket.
We opened the picket.
Yeah, and then kind of stood hesitantly on one side looking down at a variety of ropes and cables that were partially buried.
I admired your fruit.
But seriously, this is where I immediately knew that I had gone down a very special musky rabbit hole was that the door opened and in front of me was what I believed to be possibly a baby grand piano that was entirely covered with brass candles and brass candlesticks and entirely underneath it was what I would guess to be two dozen globes.
Of me, varying sizes, all looking very old.
And I thought, holy shit.
Because like our friend Jason Finn says, the problem with John Roderick is it all sounds so plausible until you hear the point where it's not plausible and it's very difficult to know where the line is.
There's a rack of cowboy boots.
There was literally a rack of cowboy boots.
All of your collections are real collections.
I saw, if I may say, John, I saw your fucking Braille Playboys.
I thought that was made up.
Yeah.
We browsed them.
Scott browsed them at length.
You and Scott Simpson spent quite a bit of time reading the Braille Playlist.
If I could say, you should make people wear those white cotton gloves when they handle your Braille.
Well, you know, my feeling about all this stuff here is it's here to be used.
So, for instance, the rack of cowboy boots, I wear every pair, even though they are, of course, a collection.
And then the globes I consult because the globes represent different eras of globe making.
Are they sort of snapshots of history that you like to contrast?
That's exactly right.
Mm-hmm.
You look at a globe that you find in a thrift store and you look at the nations of Africa and the borders of, you know, like East Asia and all those borders have changed.
All those countries are different now.
Oceania.
Oceania, right, right.
Right.
And here's the thing.
I don't want to get into this because I'm starting to obsess over it, but I've been thinking a lot about obsessive compulsion and Howard Hughes.
I've been thinking a great deal the last few days about this.
Yeah, Howard Hughes.
Howard Hughes is looming large in my mind right now, and we probably just shouldn't get into it.
But here's something I have to know that you know, which is that maps, and I believe with Globes, there's always at least one fake thing on it.
Really?
Do you know about this?
No.
There's a name for it.
It's like a canary trap, but with a globe.
It's a thing that map makers, globe makers do as a kind of, like, that's how we know it's my globe.
Bingo.
That's what you mean by canary trap.
Bingo.
So here's the thing.
You get a map.
You get the map.
It's flawless.
There's this new map of the United States.
I think it's a map of the United States I really want to get.
It's the result of all these years of research.
It's the most optimized version of everything that could be annoying about a map they've made really great.
I really want it, want it, want it.
But the greatest map in the world still has a fake city on it or has a fake road.
Often it's a fake road.
So they can see...
You ever go to one of those annoying fucking lyrics sites on the web?
You want to get the lyrics to your Rod Stewart song?
And if you copy some text, it'll also copy some other stuff.
They put deliberate errors in there to find out.
See, they scraped it from somebody else.
But now if somebody scrapes it from them, they're all butthurt.
You know, here, it's the fucking earth.
Okay, we get it.
We know what's there.
But you put in a fake road.
Now, here's my problem.
That road or country or city is very unlikely to be anything that I ever consult, but now I can't stop thinking about it.
I have to know what is the one fake thing on this globe.
You're searching the map for the fake thing.
Does your brain work at all like that?
It does, absolutely.
It's an Easter egg.
I think I found a fake road on a map not very long ago because I was looking at a map of my mom's hometown and
And there was a road.
This is Ohio?
This is in Ohio.
There was a road that was named after her maiden name, which I won't say.
No, no.
Oh, boy, you better not.
But let's say her maiden name was... Just give me the last four digits of her last name.
Let's say it was Frugian Glacier.
The last four digits of her maiden name.
So we're driving along.
We're looking at this map together of her hometown.
And she says, look at that.
It's a Frusian Glodger Road.
There's no road like that in this town.
I would know about it.
So we went to all the computer.
We said, computer.
We went to the computers.
And we were zooming in on the town from outer space.
And we were looking at it in all these different places and all these different directions.
And there's this... And it's like...
It's like a quarter of a mile long, this little thing.
It connects a nothing to a nothing.
Very, very suspicious.
Yeah.
And she says, if that was a thing, if they named a road after my family in that town, I would absolutely know about it.
And this road is just sitting out there.
It doesn't go to anywhere.
And I was like, fake road.
Holy shit, John.
Look at that link I just sent.
Are you ready for this?
Are you ready for the name?
You know what this is called?
Hmm.
You ready?
It has a name, this phenomenon?
Trap Street.
Trap Street!
Trap Street.
A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area of the map, nominally covers for the purposes of quote-unquote trapping potential copyright violators.
Now, can this be true even on a... Is this something that has been happening for years so that all these old globes I have under the piano?
John, my concern is there may be no way to ever find out.
Those are the globes...
I mean it's deliberately incorrect, and I doubt that there's any kind of documentation, addenda, appendix, or et cetera that would tell us, oh, by the way, here's the trap street we never want you to fucking find.
Now this goes – now there's two streets, two trap streets we could go down here.
There's a fork in the trap street.
First of all, I want to point out on the legal issues section of the trap street page, there's apparently some – it appears that trap streets cannot be copyrighted.
So just so you know, it appears that under copyright law, you are not allowed to copyright the name of a fake street that doesn't exist on a map.
Okay.
All right.
Copyright law for the win.
Now you're getting into a thing like those bullshit email signatures where you go, this is the only recipient.
Now I agree to nothing.
I agree to nothing.
This is not a tacit contract.
Right, right.
And B, holy shit, how much of the stuff that's out there that we're dealing with or should be dealing with is actually a kind of, if I may say, trap street.
John, it seems to me that as someone who's concerned about these issues of intelligence, this is the kind of thing you need to know about, think about, and maybe not even admit to knowing.
Do you worry about trap streets?
Think what trap streets could do.
Think about what you could do with trap streets.
Well, here's the thing, though.
For me personally, although I love maps and I consult maps constantly on an hourly basis, I very seldom use maps for navigation.
Because when I'm going from a place to another place...
In advance of traveling, I will say, okay, I'm going to this place up here, and I'll look at a map, and I'll get the general idea of the area where the place I'm going is.
Like, I'll locate it in the quadrant of the map.
But when I leave home, I try to, A, always take a different route, and B, not ever really exactly know where I'm going.
Right.
So that when I get into that general area, even if they could, even if they could read your mind, they still wouldn't know.
Exactly.
And not only that, I have the old fashioned sensation of arriving in a location, a general area, a high street, if you will, the main part of town or the, you know, out by the beach or wherever.
Then I'm there and I go, I know it's right around here somewhere.
And then I go up and down the streets and I go back and forth.
And this is, of course, a problem if I have to be there at a certain time.
That's not your fault.
But you know what?
That's not my fault.
They should have counted for that.
And then I have that excitement and the satisfaction of discovering the place.
Mm-hmm.
And, and, and very often going directly to it because it's the obvious, it's obvious.
It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to a place called the tower building and you get out there and it's like, huh, well, there's only one place that that could be this, that, that building up there looks like a tower and none of the other buildings do.
So anyway, that is a way in which – so I do not use GPS, certainly.
It's not just simply – well, let's just take it as read.
But for you, it's not simply a matter of cartographical cheating.
Certainly you want a sharp mind.
You're not going to shave with soap.
You're going to have the minimal number of steps exposed to people as part of your process.
But then you're learning also.
It's your autodidacticism that follows your nose.
Is that right?
And so what is much more likely and what happens all the time is that I discover roads that are not on the map.
Rather than thinking that there's a road because it says so on the map and then there's no road.
Is it the opposite of a trap street?
Well, I'm guessing if you were making a trap street, you would not make the trap street.
You would not locate the trap street on your map in a place where people would say, wow, that's a cool shortcut.
You know what I mean?
What you described with Maiden Lane was exactly how it works.
I think you'll see a little cul-de-sac that's called like Jokey Court.
And so Jokey Court – I mean it doesn't even matter what it is probably.
It should look plausible.
But the point is if they're going to Xerox that or whatever people do today, scan it, it's not going to matter what it's called.
They're going to fax it to each other.
It could be called Fuck You in the Eye Lane.
The thing is that it's going to show up on the map and you go, ha-ha.
Yeah.
We, we might own the copyright on fuck you, but probably not.
Boy, that, boy, that, you know, I don't know.
I guess I'm just thinking it's, it's, and again, please say as little as you can about this, unless you want to say more.
It just strikes me that when you get into the area of intelligence or, or human or, or, or, uh, or animate or any of the different kinds of Intel.
Yeah.
Right.
Human for, for our listeners who are not versed in the, in the clandestine arts, it's just human intelligence.
Yeah.
I learned about that after the 9-11.
You'd hear people saying that a lot, and people were confused about what it meant.
It's like ordinance.
Yeah, humant sounds like something that you would put in the bottom of a flower pot in order to have your petunias grow.
Or a new wave band.
Humant.
Ooh.
Hello.
Hello, idea.
Boy, there's a lot on the table here.
We're not even near that ukulele string.
But, you know, press on, press on.
Well, OK, all I'm saying is, OK, let me give you a few examples.
For example, if I remember correctly, Dick Cheney, who I think might be even more monkey balls than you, Dick Cheney, I believe, had the Naval Observatory removed from Google Maps.
Oh, he had it pixelated.
Like smudged.
Yeah.
And, like, maybe he had it shifted a couple feet.
I don't know, right?
Yeah.
Now, you remember, like, for example, there's many issues here.
You may remember that when GPS first became a consumer product, there was a built-in fucked-up-edness to it where they made it off.
First of all, like, even when it got good, it was still, you were never allowed to be closer than, what, like, four feet or something?
Oh, no, it was more than that.
It was, like, ten feet at first.
Because you didn't want to be able to put a bomb right in the Kaiser's pocket.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Or drop the bombs between the minarets down on Kasbah Lane.
Hmm.
Is it not Kasbah?
Is that a trap lane?
Kasbah Way.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And in fact, you know, in those early days of satellite pictures on the internet, I had a lot of... There was a lot of...
There was a lot of forest that I was very interested in what was underneath it.
And I would go to these places on the globe and I would zoom in on these dark forests.
And they had decided that because these forests were either A, just empty forest, or B, forests...
special installations that you couldn't zoom in on them.
It was just, it was like, well, it's just green.
Who decides that?
Who decides that?
Now, again, I'm not going to let Howard Hughes into this, but I know there are ways that you can send specially coded messages through a variety of people so that there is no backwards contamination of fake hepatitis from a man with cancer.
And there's a variety of ways you can make what's called a paddle out of 50 Kleenexes.
I know that there are ways that you can handle these things.
A, is there a way to ensure that there's the right brush coverage for your installation?
And B...
Who sends – who holds the paddle tissues in their hand to let someone know that that installation needs to be reforested?
What's Google's motto?
Oh, don't be evil.
Don't be evil.
Right.
So taken as read, if you assume that if your motto is don't be evil, that Google is never evil.
My motto has got to be true, right?
It's in the name, motto.
Precisely.
By definition, Google has never been evil, and so they cannot have possibly collaborated in smudging out their map program with evil forces or people that have secret installations in the forest.
So it has to be either A, just a coincidence, B, an accident.
Maybe, you know, there was a little thumb smudge on the lens.
Whoops.
Or it's like a Stuxnet thing where the government has written a Stuxnet program.
Stuxnet program.
This is the one.
This could be the one, John.
That blurbs out all their secret forest information.
Pack a small bag.
You've got about 40 seconds.
You think I don't have a small bag packed?
Commander, we've spotted a white picket and some exposed wires under a fruit tree.
It looks like there's a swimming pool that might have some debris in it.
Over.
I've got a safe room.
I've got a decoy safe room.
I have a tunnel under the street and I have a tunnel away from the street.
Okay, setting aside Howard Hughes, this is why I'm obsessed with this.
It seems very important, John.
See, having a safe room.
Yeah, they're just going to burn it down around you.
I was trying to explain the very little bit that I understand about security to people.
And what's the term that they use?
Okay, for example, I was trying to explain to my friend how I think about security.
And as a demonstration, we were in like a little green room conference room thing.
I took six paper cups and I put them on a table and I said, which one has the million dollars under it?
You have one guess.
And he said, I have no idea.
So I surreptitiously took one of the cups and drew a giant lock on it and said, this is locked.
And then I moved them all around and I said, okay, which one of those has the million dollars under it?
He picked the one with the lock.
Oddly enough, he picked the one with the giant fucking lock on it.
My concern, somebody goes out and they spend what?
Probably $4,000 to $9 million on a safe room.
You could probably buy a pretty nice safe room, right?
Yeah.
I think a safe room is going to cost you $50,000 for the base model.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like Rorschach finding the comedian's costume.
He's going to go measure the closet.
He's going to see Amityville horror style.
Huh, that's kind of weird.
There's an extra couple inches here.
I wonder what's going on here.
You could get a fucking blueprint of any house in America.
That's not going to be hard.
I think what you need is an obviously overstocked, super obvious, but secret enough safe room, and that becomes your trap room, right?
Trap room.
Trap room.
They go there and they think he's got to be in here.
Somewhere.
And they spend 15 hours with an arc welder trying to break in through your vintage safe door.
I'm not giving away too much here.
No.
Vintage can mean a very long time, John.
And in fact, your safe room is just this Ikea bed that had a hinge on it that led to a stairway.
That's good.
That's good.
Nobody's going to look under the Ikea bed.
That's not the first place you're going to look.
You know, my whole life...
This has become kind of a thing now to like have a house with, you know, oh, if you're a rich person, your bookcase can turn around.
Like I can't even tell you, John, how much my entire life I have wanted to have tunnels in my house and under my house.
I think every single listener of Roderick on that has survived this far probably has a desire to have a bookcase that opens to reveal a secret room.
Or a fake secret room.
Ah.
No, no.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
I bet all of us either on our desk or in our head or in an undisclosed location – and I do have the domain name undisclosedlocation.com.
I actually do.
Somewhere you have a jar that if it is not full of your own urine for sanitary reasons probably is full of pocket change because you're saving up –
to fucking retrofit whatever you live in to have tunnels.
Having a slide would be nice.
Now, Professor X... Oh, that's so nice.
This is very important.
Professor X's mansion, they have escape tunnels, so that if the Sentinels or Striker comes, they have a way to get out.
I don't understand, at this point in my life, I don't understand how I'm 45 years old and living in a place with two means of egress, both of which are exposed.
Do you know what it's like to have a child and live with that?
I would be very uncomfortable.
But you know, my house has many ground floor exits.
Your house, we should be real careful about this, but the room that I slept in that last couple nights, it occurred to me that that room is kind of the center of the house, even though it feels like the least important room in the house.
There's this one room where you can zip through it, and you're almost anywhere in the house, including upstairs, in a second.
And you'll notice, you may not notice this.
I probably shouldn't reveal this.
We can cut it out.
We're going to end up cutting out pretty much everything except Hodgman breaking your ukulele.
But that room has a variety of motion detectors in it.
Because even though it is the least important room in the house, even though it appears to be the least important room in the house, you would, no matter where you were in the house, you would end up passing through that room.
Yeah.
triggering the motion detectors.
So when I was positioning motion detectors around my house, I was like, sure.
I noticed you had, they were a little bit, what, out of period, anachronistic, the reverse anachronistic.
I noticed that you had several very difficult to notice motion detectors.
And you can put them in places where it's like, oh, well, here I'm protecting my...
whatever my boot collection, but that's not what you do.
You put motion detectors in places where people think that they will be passing unobserved or you put them in places where people are like, Oh, well, I'll just, you know, take a shortcut through here.
And it's like, uh-huh.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Isn't this kind of how a panopticon works?
A panopticon, right?
All I need to do, or for that matter, Big Brother, all I have to do is make you have a plausible gut feeling that you either are being watched or more likely could be being watched often enough that you will know.
All I need to point at you is a tinted window.
Nothing has to be behind it.
As long as there's a tinted window there, the suspicion that someone is behind it watching you.
Boy, that's good.
And so that room, if that were me, I would fortify that room.
It was the Panopticon room.
Panopticon.
It is because it's kind of at the center too.
That's right.
Well, in any case, it was amazing to get to see all of this stuff firsthand, to see where you store your chili.
It was absolutely amazing.
The umbrella stand full of swords.
You know, I had a brief, was it an epay?
Was it a foil?
What did I have?
I think you had a saber.
Yeah, Scott Simpson attacked me with a sword.
He did, and he gave you, and he actually threw you a sword and said, defend yourself.
And I started crying.
i don't want to hold a sword it was a very uncomfortable uh and very short sword fight yeah well he has very thin bones yeah as you know he has a very small torso it makes it hard for him to breathe so you and uh and um come back later on can we come back to trap streets yes absolutely okay yeah i mean scott simpson and uh and john hodgman and jonathan colton and kathleen edwards
And for a brief period, even Jonathan Colton's deformed henchman Scarface were all staying in my house at once.
It shouldn't have worked.
There's no reason in the world it should have worked, but in fact it did.
You kept finding more places for people to sleep.
It kind of made me think.
I realized by the time that everybody was there, it was getting to be close quarters, even though you have at least two bathtubs that you'll discuss and numerous restroom facilities.
I kept thinking.
It was a little bit like MOOCs in a phone booth.
I started to wonder how many more D-list entertainment celebrities could potentially sleep in this house.
Because I bet there's more room if you needed it.
What I was considering is there's absolutely room for more beds.
I just haven't... I don't want my...
I don't want my house to look like a safe house.
You know what I mean?
You're saying somebody comes in with some kind of extra heat vision goggles.
They see 35 beds.
They're going to have questions.
Yeah, exactly.
They're going to think you're the Harriet Tubman of indie rock.
That's right.
I'm not running an underground railroad for people whose careers are on the rocks.
I'm running a house here and I want it to look like a nice house that a somewhat normal bachelor lives in by himself or with various operatives.
But I don't want it to seem like the let's go to the mattresses scene in The Godfather.
No.
Where it's just 15 guys cleaning their shotguns.
What I want.
No.
I can't stop saying that.
I know.
What I want is a guarantee.
No more.
I can't say what I want without doing this.
No, as we learned during that intense time.
I agree with you.
And here's the other thing.
Like if you're one of those idiots that's trying to fucking grow weed in your house, your electric bill is going to go through the roof and the black helicopters are going to be shooting things at your house where you will actually be a big red glowing ball.
of ultraviolet ultraviolet is that right you know square lights those grow lights throw out a lot of wattage they do and if i understand that from a black ops helicopter you could actually you can actually see with a heat scanner dealy it's a technical term you can actually see who's growing wheat yeah they use their heat scanner dealies is that true i mean as much as you can say i've heard that's true i've heard dea guys can do that they absolutely can although although there's some kind of uh i think i think it's i think it's past the search warrant
question of like, hey, we're just running our infrared cameras over the town looking for people who haven't insulated their attic.
I don't think that would be admissible in evidence.
Like you, I am an amateur attorney.
But I'm not an amateur litigator.
I do mostly amateur contract work.
But I believe the thing is now, whatever you can see from outside somebody's house with normal vision and so forth is fair game.
But with infrared cameras, that would be across the line, you think?
2012, that's normal vision.
Exactly.
Well, especially if you had a built-of-purpose robot that – what about listening?
You know you can hear vibrations.
You can certainly –
I'm hearing vibrations right now.
You're not alone, my friend.
You start watching that Howard Hughes movie and start reading that bio, everything changes.
No, no, no.
I've gone down the Howard Hughes rabbit hole myself, and I climbed back out and barely made it out.
My clothes were shredded.
But you remember as we were sitting in the garden having a high-level conference,
But there was a strange half an hour where the skies were full of military helicopters and low-flying Navy jets.
I prayed you weren't going to bring this up because I feel as though I may be – not by your design.
I feel I am being deeply drawn into your world because I was a witness to planes that weren't there.
I was a witness to – by your count, I believe it was four to six unmarked Navy planes.
You said they had a call sign on the tail that might have been made up, but they were otherwise unmarked, and sometimes you couldn't even see them.
But you live by the airport, if I could say.
Not super near the airport.
Well, I do live by the airport, but do you know anybody who lives by an airport where there are invisible helicopters?
I know people – Because you were witness to invisible helicopters.
John, there's no fucking question I was witness to that.
I know people who live near airports.
I know people who see invisible things, and I know a lot of people who hear things that may or may not be there.
But I was fucking witness in your yard with a cup of coffee, a lot of coffee.
I was witness to, with your assistance, numerous –
Very suspicious, Terran, Earthling, what appeared to be Earthling aerospace devices that a variety of things were wrong.
Yeah, they were behaving in a way that was inherently suspicious.
Right.
I understand the Doppler effect.
I understand the Doppler effect.
I know how that works.
I understand that you see the lightning, then hear the thunder.
I understand that.
But we had a clear vision of the clear skies, and I swear to Christ, I think there were some decoy noises.
I think there may have been some stealth copters.
i don't have a way of explaining this but but you know here's the thing you expect to see one to nine of those in a year and i think we saw about 16 in a day well as i said to you and i think i've said before if you were a ufo how would you disguise yourself if not as a a regular jet but just one that has no markings i've thought about it constantly and can i just say you would not write on a paper cup i'm a fucking ufo
No, you wouldn't.
And also, my suspicion is that these aircraft actually have aircraft sound broadcasting technology where they're basically throwing their voices, throwing their airplane voices.
Because the thing is that by living by the airport, I am witness to dozens of jets a day that behave like normal jets and they sound like normal jets and the jet flies and it sounds like the sound is coming from the jet.
But then there are these periods, these strange periods, where all of a sudden there are Black Hawk helicopters all around.
And then there are jets flying, but then there are the sound of jets coming from all around.
And no jets at all.
I think they're throwing their voices.
Well, there's no – John, let's look at the facts here.
Could you not probably tell more or less if somewhere on your block if someone shot a pistol, you could have a – I'm guessing you would have a pretty good idea what caliber of pistol that was.
Whenever someone on my block shoots a pistol.
Whenever, sorry.
And it's not all the time.
Have a good day.
But regular enough that – Ramadan.
Either it's Ramadan or there's a wedding.
Or there's the end of a wedding.
Or somebody just got on the end of a wedding.
The natural result of a wedding.
Or somebody just got laid off from their job.
Or in the case of the most recent gun that was fired in my neighborhood was that my next door neighbor went into his daughter's room in the middle of the night to find a teenage boy there with her.
And the teenage boy jumped out the window onto the roof.
And my neighbor... Oh, he was her guest.
He was her guest.
Okay.
And the teenage girl was yelling at her dad, no, no, no.
And he ran out into the street and the teenage boy was running up the street and he fired a handful of...
32 rounds into the sky is that a saturday night special that's a well it's yeah basically it's a police police special okay and so uh you know this is like 4 30 in the morning which is kind of right in my that's in my afternoon and so i was able to be at my window and
and know how many shots he had left i was able to be at my window and you know and and and ready to engage fully ready to engage whoever it was and it was my neighbor standing in the street in his underwear shooting his gun in the air and i went oh all right well dad i'm not needed here
Well, clearly, he's got the uniform.
He's got it all well in hand.
He's got the dad uniform of underwear and a gun.
About 30 minutes later, this is now 5 o'clock in the morning, the street is full of cop cars because somebody called it in, not me.
And my neighbor's out there still in his underwear explaining himself to these cops.
And it isn't long before they're all laughing and slapping each other on the back.
And it's a big, you know, it's a big hoedown out there.
And they, you know, they wag their fingers at him.
Oh, you.
And he goes back inside and the cops drive off.
And I'm like, interesting.
So I don't see him for a couple of days.
But the next time I run into him, I'm like, hey, what was that all about?
And he tells me the story.
And it all seems perfectly normal.
That is an incident.
That's an example of what I could consider just the normal firearm discharge that goes along with living in this part of town.
But...
Now that the police are testing their automatic weapons down the hill, it is disturbing my ability to locate and identify normal gunfire.
Oh, and there... Hmm.
Now, for a lot of people in the neighborhood, that might be just unnerving.
But for you, that is adding, if I may say, noise, as in signal to noise.
Static, precisely.
Yeah.
I mentioned it the other day on Twitter, like, oh, the police are testing their...
I mean, they didn't used to fire automatic weapons.
They sat down there at their gun range and they went, pap, pap, pap, pap, pap, pap.
But now they feel outgunned or something, and they're down there with machine guns.
And, you know, obviously it only happens for a little bit, you know, once every few days.
They decide to unleash a fusillade.
But it really is, you know, usually in this neighborhood when you heard automatic weapons, that's when you knew that someone was having a dispute.
That some young people were having a dispute.
Right.
It might have been about real estate or commerce.
It would be a real estate problem, a commerce problem.
It might be a romantic issue.
I mean, obviously, young people and machine guns is inherently romantic.
But anyway, so the police are kind of, they're gumming up my game.
And I believe it's another example of this.
They're throwing sound.
They're throwing sound at me.
in order to confuse and disrupt my normal perception.
Yeah, it's one thing to play Van Halen to Manuel Noriega, because who knows whether he's a fan.
I think you would probably be mostly okay with that.
If it was Hot For Teacher, you might want to just dig in and make some more coffee.
When they were explaining that they were trying to irritate Manuel Noriega by playing Van Halen really loud, I was like, that was right at the age where you and I both probably were like, what?
That sounds amazing.
They actually played in Panama, right?
Yeah.
That's a little on the nose.
It's a little on the nose, but they were playing it through some Army-grade hi-fi systems.
Does the Army have special hi-fis?
I'm sorry, if you can say.
I'm pretty sure that the army has hi-fi technology that the rest of us can only dream of.
Well, it seems like, boy, this is going to get... They've been working on the brown sound for years, weaponizing the brown sound.
I spend so much of my day worrying about when the browns... Every time I hear a train coming, I'm thinking, that's it, this is the brown sound.
This is going to be disruptive.
Like I need a fucking brown sound in my life.
You know what?
They would test it out on San Francisco too.
That's the first place they would test it.
Or maybe they would have it shoot out of a non-existent plane that may or may not really be there.
Here's my question to you.
Were you there?
I believe you were there when something either to my friends, my friends find this either supernatural or I find it embarrassing.
Were you there when a truck,
was heard outside your house.
I was able to identify which delivery service it was.
Oh, you were brilliant.
You identified by the sound of the diesel motor and the way the truck drove up the street.
This is the beauty of expertise.
I can't tell you why the roast beef weighs five pounds.
All I know is that the roast beef weighs five pounds, right?
But you did.
FedEx.
You said FedEx and we all walked around the side of the house and sure enough it was a FedEx truck and we were like...
I'm really good at... But the thing is, listening to that motor, to me, as a non-expert, that could have been a garbage truck.
It could have been a city... Well, you could certainly be forgiven for sandbagging here, John, but I do think you're sandbagging.
Well, anyway, let's not get into it.
But I'm really good at UPS versus Postal Service.
The United States Postal Service, they have a very, very recognizable sound to them.
And I think also – okay, you ready for this?
Here's a tip.
They tune their motors?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Well, you know, like you go by – we talked about this with Scoots.
Like you go and get a Prius now and it's got a fake car sound on it.
Skeuomorphism, right?
I'm so excited about that.
That's such an interesting idea.
John, everything is related.
Are you aware of that?
It really is.
That everything is related?
Yes.
It's on my family crest right after a roast beef sandwich.
Do you keep that in the real safe room, if you can say?
I'm still working on the crest.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
I get, I'm sorry to say, so many deliveries of various kinds.
Right.
Well, we were discussing this, that you are taking advantage of the new economy.
Mm-hmm.
Uh-huh.
Meaning I am ruining the environment.
Excuse me.
So you are someone who would rather have his toilet paper delivered from a warehouse in China.
And paper towels.
Flown across the country and hand-delivered to your door.
Uh, if it was, if it's three cents cheaper than, uh, then, then you would go down to the corner grocery store and carry it.
Oh John, if it were $20 more, I'd still do it just because I want to offset all of this green stuff that's going on.
Right.
So, so you, you literally order your toilet paper from a warehouse in Kentucky.
And have it hand-delivered to you.
This is the kind of thing that should be in books.
What I do should be in books because it is so appalling on so many levels that it's the kind of thing that people will eventually write about.
There's a company based in Seattle called Amazon that I use.
Amazon.com is their web address on the web.
Apparently they are taking over the internet according to Wired Magazine.
Oh, they are.
Well, we were there when we got our picture taken with the Palm Chili and I showed you those lockers.
Yeah.
Yeah, same day.
Same day delivery.
So long, Bob's Comics.
Okay, so here's the thing.
I hated Bob anyway.
Bob was such a dick.
I hated Bob's Camera Store.
I hated Bob's Hobby Shop.
You know what?
Bob's Camera Store was actually, they helped me out, but you're right.
I think you're referring to a prime lens.
My dad's service pistol from World War II.
I still have it.
And he had never cleaned it, as far as I could tell.
Is this the bluing anecdote?
Yeah, ever since he moved out of the Navy, ever since he left the Navy.
But I took it into this gun shop called Bob's Guns.
Did I tell this story already?
Lost the valley because of the re-bluing in the 70s?
Well, yeah, but what was amazing about it was I walk into this place with a gun kind of in my jacket.
Yeah.
And I walk over and I put it down on the table and I'm like, hey, I don't know anything about this gun.
I don't know how to clean it and I want to know how to clean it.
I want to know how to take it apart.
And they all gathered around and they stripped this gun down to just the nuts and washers.
And the guy walks me through the process of cleaning it, field stripping it, cleaning it, and putting it back together.
And he does it for me like...
Four times.
Real slow.
Like, here's how you do it.
He didn't have to, like, look it up.
Somebody comes in with a 60-year-old 45, and he just goes, oh, here's how you do it.
Boom, boom, boom.
Absolutely.
Shit.
And all the guys buying the car.
I have to read the instructions on how to change my tire every time.
These guys look – the thing is they are exactly the guys that run comic book stores.
They're the same guys.
They're heavyset guys.
Vests.
There's a vest, although these vests are like bristling with guns.
But they do – they have the same vest.
They have the same kind of like – they're losing their hair, but they've got some hair and it's kind of – that's like –
It's plastered down with sweat.
They have a beard that's trimmed.
They trimmed it kind of close, but then they haven't shaved in a few days, so the hair is kind of growing back.
And they brought that same expertise to this thing.
And the guy, I wasn't there to buy anything.
I wasn't there...
We had no commercial interaction of any kind.
He just spent a half an hour teaching me really slowly how to field strip and put back together, field strip clean and reassemble this gun.
And it was because he loved it.
And I...
was so, I'm still so grateful to that guy.
And that was a place called Bob's Guns.
You know, I'm sorry, I apologize.
That was uncut.
It's not all Bob's.
The whole Bob enterprise, like, Bob's cameras, Bob's comic books, you're right, I don't care about those people.
Well, it's a certain – I mean I don't want to be reductive, as you know.
I never want to be reductive.
You are not ever reductive.
No, no.
You know, there's a certain type.
And I think that one of the extreme examples can be the comic book guy, right?
Not simply the one on The Simpsons.
Speaking of The Simpsons, I did just send you a link.
Herman, the guy who runs the gun store on The Simpsons, I think is pretty close to what you're talking about.
Esquivalience.
Esquivalience.
Are you talking about esquivalience being the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities?
Is that what you're talking about?
I'm so excited about esquivalience.
Esquivalience.
Isn't that a great word?
Esquivalience.
Mm-hmm.
It's a very great word.
But anyway, you were saying about the... Did you read about esquivalience?
I'm reading about it, and I'm very excited.
I kind of feel like it should be... I kind of feel like that should be an Easter egg.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, okay.
That's a good idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No soap radio.
That's good.
Well, they should check.
They should also check the door.
10-4.
Wilco.
Wilco.
Roger Wilco.
Redundant, redundant.
Can you explain to me your interest in radio terminology?
Oh, sure.
I can.
Sure, I can.
Have you talked about that with Dan?
Oh, no, no, no.
I don't think so.
I could – a little bit.
I could also discuss my Amazon workflow.
We could talk about pump chili.
I was much more interested in your Amazon relationship.
Well, you know, I believe it was on this show that we were discussing some of these matters and my interest in – what's it called?
Voice procedure.
And a friend of the show, I believe it was the show, but a friend sent along a fantastic PDF that I will forward to you in case you missed it, which is this very, very long document of pretty much everything I've ever wanted to know about all of that stuff.
A bunch of stuff about how to identify – like when you're making a little map in the sand and you make a square here and here's what we know about happening.
It's all how to do that army stuff I wish I knew about.
Yeah.
And I think it might even have what I've been looking for for years.
And there's no way I can show you what I'm doing right now.
But imagine I'm squatting and I've got camouflage – camo makeup.
I believe they got it.
And imagine that there's a bunch of guys with me.
There's some guys over there and other guys over there.
And using my hand signals, pointing at my eyes and sticking up a certain number of fingers, I give directions.
Right.
I want to know what the fuck that is and how I can do it.
Well, you know, I have a copy.
Is there a name for that?
There's a special forces handbook here, and I should have made a copy of it for you.
Can you even do that?
Are those pages Xeroxable?
Is it in, like, blue ink or anything?
Oh, good point.
No, I think they are Xeroxable.
That might release – again, I apologize for the Howard Hughes concerns.
That might, upon exposure to bright light like you would have in a Xerox –
Yeah, yeah.
While I wandered weak and raveny, it might actually release some kind of a subtle gas that would enable Black Ops to see that you had tried to Xerox a special ops manual.
I don't want to make it weird.
Well, you know, the special ops manual has a lot of... A lot of...
Like sort of tiger trap instructions.
Oh, I need that.
I need that.
One thing it doesn't talk about is whether the book itself is a tiger trap.
Well, see, this is the thing.
I think this is the trap street.
U.S.
Army Special Forces.
I've read every page of it a thousand times, though.
Unconventional warfare manual.
This is something I need to read.
I should probably also be waterboarded.
Not a lot, but like a little bit.
You know, I think everybody in America should be waterboarded a little bit just to experience what it is.
What do you think it should cost?
What should they pay for that?
There would be a lady doing it?
I think there should be a little Korean lady at the airport right next to the massage tables.
How small?
Like Linda Hunt sized?
Small enough that she needs to stand on an overturned milk crate to properly waterboard a big man.
But it'd be something that as you're, as you're coming, you're, you're there at the airport, you got 45 minutes before your flight.
Oh, it's like one of those creepy massage tables.
Yeah, you go get somebody to pour water down your throat while they're holding a cheesecloth over your face.
Just so you get a sense of like... I have a real different sense of the feeling of that.
I know no matter what, it's going to be horrible when I scream for them to stop.
But I think I would scream differently depending on who was doing it.
I'm not going to lie to you.
I bet that's popular in Germany, but not with water.
You mean like if somebody was waterboarding you, but they were also kind of cradling your balls?
Yeah.
They call it Scheissenborden.
Scheissenborden.
That's a Scheissenborden.
Wait, no, wait.
That would be Swedish, I guess.
Anyway, goddammit.
This is going to be tough.
We've got to fork this episode, John.
There's just too much here.
One of the questions that I have for you, somebody who has done multiple, multiple, multiple podcasts,
i feel that we are getting into a place where neither you nor i can fully separate our real life interactions our podcast interactions and our other uh daily conversations so that we are we're having this kind of uh this hesitancy where it's like have we talked about this before i know i've told you about this before but have we now what do we do i personally i personally could care fucking less if we repeat ourselves personally personally
But, I mean, one of my concerns... Did I ever tell you about the time that I stole my dad's plane?
What?
Oh, wait, I've never told that story.
I've never heard that story.
Oh, my gosh.
We'll get to that.
Shit, I'm going to need another stack.
Coming up, my game, delivery truck sound, Amazon workflow.
Yeah, now... Workflow, okay.
We talked about this at length with Scott Simpson, which is how long can we sustain a universe in which toilet paper...
In which it is cost effective to deliver toilet paper and paper towels that have been flown to your town from far, far away.
I actually know the answer to that.
Until two to five years ago.
We're already past it.
So here's how this works.
I'll make this quick.
First of all, we should mention that there is – we'll put this up.
A tremendous photo taken by – I forget.
I think it was Scott.
It took a wonderful photo of you and I in front of a pump chili slash cheese machine at a 7-Eleven.
I think we both look very handsome.
That was my local, as they say in the UK.
That's your local.
That's my local 7-Eleven.
And you say there's frequently some very colorful characters out there.
Yeah, well, as we were rounding the corner, I prepared you guys for making it through the phalanx of junkies.
That neighborhood is one of those neighborhoods that 25 years ago, no one in the city zoning office held any hope out for it at all.
They were like, ah, this neighborhood's really close into town, and it has a bunch of big Victorian houses.
Who's ever going to want to live there?
So this is the neighborhood that we're going to put all the halfway houses, all the like, you know, group homes and places where people are have just been released from jail.
But because they're a level three sex offender, we can't really release them into the larger population.
So they have to live together all low jacked in like a 17 room Victorian.
That's one of my favorite guy to buy voices records.
Low jacking the repeat offender.
And so that neighborhood, as you walk down the street, of course, in the intervening 20 years, 80% of those large Victorian homes have been completely restored and now have young couples living in them.
And the sidewalk out front is covered with chalk drawings of princesses and stars, like their children.
Each one has exactly one fucking obvious safe room.
right there are there are from from house to house you can go tibetan flags next house no tibetan flags next house tibetan flags and you kind of get a sense of who rainbow rainbow flagging and uh princess drawing there was the there was the funk band playing across the street as we walked walked up the block they were good and they were polite they were nice they were playing at a polite volume for a neighborhood and then there's the victorian house which is a sex offender halfway house this is the one of which you spoke
You said you lived near a place in the Puffy Leather Jacket episode or Puffy – yeah, when you saw the guy in the Puffy Jacket.
You described – if memory serves, you have one place that is for dangerous people and another one that's for dangerous crazy people.
Right, and they're both on the same block and they're both – That is convenient as hell.
If Amazon has to bring them toilet paper, can you imagine the economies of scale to that?
You know what?
They just have a steady, like, every day.
It's just like a conveyor belt of toilet paper, peanut butter.
Things that can be made into shivs.
Well, you know, they're out on the street.
They aren't being held in these structures.
These structures couldn't hold them anyway.
They could, like, punch their way through the walls of these old rickety houses.
But anyway, so they tend to congregate out in front of that 7-Eleven.
And some of them are swatting at imaginary bees.
And some of them are trying to secure some methadone.
And some of them are, you know, are like standing out there really like smoking really angrily.
Like they're so mad.
and they're not mad at the cigarette we've got an angry smoker in our neighborhood you do oh he's super angry and very ritualistic mad mad mad and smokes the cigarette all the way down to the butt and then like i'm gonna make a video and show this to you but he has uh you you when you were in the uh when you were in civil air patrol what were you in i was in the civil air did you ever have to do any drills with with rifles
We did do some rifle drills.
There's a 16-move rifle.
I forget what it's called, but not a cadence.
But there's a 16-move rifle thing that I can still do in my sleep with the flips and everything.
Boom, bam, boom, ba-da-bam, bam, bam.
But it's like a kata, right?
It's like a firearms kata.
It's like chick, chock, tick, tock, peep, pop, cheap, boat, side, down, right?
Up and down and over and down.
Imagine if somebody had a cigarette kata or a cigarette cadence.
I don't know what you call it.
So imagine this guy who's very tall and very old, and he – imagine him like starts out with his cigarette at waist level lit.
He pops it up at a 45-degree angle, throws it at his face as though he's trying to aim for his mouth, takes an angry puff, pulls it back out and down, and doing that repeatedly every one and a half seconds until the cigarette is gone.
Chick-a-potty-bo.
Chick-a-potty-bo.
And he's just standing there in front of that restaurant by my house, like a, like a, like a great malignant gargoyle.
So you go in and when you got the Amazon, you got this thing on Amazon prime, which I have to imagine you're probably a member of.
It's a very secret organization, but you go in for 80 bucks a year.
Everybody knows this.
You get, uh, almost everything on Amazon, uh, delivered in two days for free or overnight for three 99.
And it's just literally destroying retail America.
Uh,
And so what we do is we say, you know what?
We want the Costco-sized box of paper towels, and we want that delivered to our home automatically, bill us for it every 30 days, send a giant-ass thing of paper towels to our house, which on the face of it almost sounds innocuous until you really think about the fact that somebody took – made some cardboard, wrapped paper around it.
Yeah.
wrapped plastic around six of those, put six of those in a cardboard box.
And then somewhere in Reno, Nevada, that is put on a truck and is driven to my home.
So we pay to have paper delivered to our house.
It's basically could we please have a monthly box of things to throw away and just fill me.
I'm guessing that at the end of every month, you very seldom make your way all the way through that gross of toilet paper or whatever it is.
I don't like to lap.
No, I feel like it should be a clean start, yeah.
So you don't have a – there's not a closet in the house where toilet paper is stockpiling and pretty soon you have like a year's worth in there.
You mean like rollover sheets?
Yeah, like the leftover rolls.
Like rollover minutes.
We're not going to have – will we have extra rolls that would go into our third safe house, safe room?
Right.
Do you have rollover minutes in your toilet paper?
Here's the thing.
Once you become a paper towel person, and my sense is that you are, I won't say parsimonious, I would say given the extremely high quality of the paper towels that you use, you use those blue ones that are like for an automotive garage.
I use automotive garage blue paper towels.
Which can be reusable.
Us, it's more like at the grocery store when somebody throws up or a thing of milk breaks and they just grab 50 of those rolls and start sopping stuff up.
Oh, I've seen that.
I love that.
Love that.
no no we've recently moved to one that's half sheets and so i'm looking at one right now yeah yeah no no i contrast this so basically i'm single-handedly ruining the environment i contrast this with my grandfather my uh my grandfather who was who was probably the cheapest man i ever met in my life he once instructed me on how to wipe um by saying that you never need more than a total of six sheets of single ply toilet paper to take care of your your bottom area
Yeah.
This is what I grew up with, John.
It was Scott toilet paper and directions from a man from South America on how to wipe.
Well, you know, in his probably in his defense, when he was a kid, he had he had like a banana leaf that he carried with him everywhere.
Yeah.
He's a colonialist.
So so he had really nice banana leaves.
Oh, well, he had a rag then.
He had a rag that somebody washed out for him.
They call it Harry Rag.
You've got three for the first cut and then two for the second cut.
Oh, my God.
If you want to do it until it's bloody, you better get in there fast because you get six and that's it.
He was very upset with how much.
And here's the other thing to paper towels.
He had this friend.
So my grandparents and their best friends had both retired from Cincinnati Gas and Electric at the same time and moved to the same place in Florida.
And they continued to be friends for life.
John Klump.
You think they were having key parties?
I have certainly thought about it.
I've wondered if my grandfather was a war criminal.
He was definitely not a dentist.
He came here to become a dentist, and that never happened.
I think it was some kind of a jam up.
I don't know.
But John Klump became – everything that went wrong in the house, he would explain how John Klump did it better.
Now, in John Klump's house, you have one paper towel, one paper towel or napkin for lunch.
You fold it like a fucking gentleman.
You put it under your placemat because you're 70 and you have a placemat, and you use it again at dinner.
That's how my grandfather rolled.
Wow.
John, he kept a close eye on the paper.
Now, wait a minute.
Give me the back story on why you have any suspicion at all that your grandfather might have been a war criminal.
Yeah, he's from South America.
He was one of those guys.
Was he from South America or did he have a stopover in South America?
Shh.
Two things, yes.
Good question.
Well, you know how the lost generation?
I think he was like with the found generation.
He was one of those lucky bastards that was too young for World War I and too old for World War II.
So obviously I don't think he was Roland Gehring or such.
His family were colonialists.
They were diamond people, low-level diamond people from London who just happened to be in British Guyana.
Wow.
Right near Jonestown, turns out.
Turns out.
Boy, and he could use the N-word with abandon.
He was really good at it.
He was really, really good at it.
I really want to hear more about him.
Well, we could certainly get into that.
All I'm saying is if I can identify the sound of my paper towels arriving, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's an exciting day.
That's like Christmas morning.
The new paper towels are here.
The new paper towels are here.
One of – Howard Hughes had extremely detailed written instructions about – he called them paddles.
You need a certain number of paddles.
Paddles are what you would use to handle things.
So if you're going to open a cabinet, that required five Kleenexes.
He wrote these out.
He had – I posted this on my internet site.
He had – I like that in public restrooms.
I never touch a paper towel in my hand.
He had three pages single-spaced on how his staff was to open canned fruit.
Listen, I don't think it's healthy for you to start researching Howard Hughes.
The way of the future.
It's too close.
The way of the future.
You have to leave that alone.
And you should research people that are having sex parties.
You know what, Sean?
You know what it is?
It's too on the nose.
I think – so I was on a program the other day discussing obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I didn't even realize how much of a certain kind – because, you know, for example, this is not about you, except in as much as it's probably about you.
You should know hoarding.
Hoarding, which is such an ugly word.
It's an ableist word.
Terrible word.
Terrible word.
You know, hoarding is a form of OCD.
You know that, right?
Well, yeah.
When you have stacks of old coupons and empty cans of beans lying around, that's hoarding.
What I'm doing is collecting.
I think you're an archivist.
You're a historian.
That's a totally different thing.
If I could get paper towels and toilet paper from Goodwill, then I could do one-stop-stop.
So it might be distressed, but it's definitely not used.
It's probably sealed.
As part of SuperTrain, the initial concept of SuperTrain was that you would have in-home recycling.
So that all your glass and your aluminum canes... Mal never could have dreamed that it would go this far.
It's not backyard... Not backyard steel.
But it is – you'd have a little – some holes in the countertop and you would separate your recycling as you do now.
But instead of it being trucked away to some mysterious third location, in the counter of your kitchen, there would be the grinders and the masticators –
And the slurry.
And you would create the slurry right there.
And then your in-counter recycling thing would make new glass bottles.
Although, of course, I don't know why you would want that.
But let's say your in-counter, then when the truck pulled up out front, you could hand them a compacted glass block of your green glass and your white glass.
But you could make your own paper.
You could extract all the precious metals so that at the end of the month you had a little vial of gold.
Oh, they would collect like the fat off of a George Foreman grill.
Exactly.
You'd get, you know, that little trace amount of silver, the little trace amount.
You have a little tin cup.
That's exactly right.
I still don't understand quite all the details for SuperTrain, which is probably going to be better for me.
But is there any extrusion involved?
We love the idea of a super tight little cube.
It's like a garbage compactor except it's Heineken bottles or what have you.
But could there be some basic extrusion where you could slurry your plastics into an as-needed plastic without off-gassing or out-gassing?
Yeah, I think absolutely, although what you would end up with is a little pile of carbon and some very highly refined oil.
And you could sell the oil in the open market, and then you sequester the carbon.
And everybody would, you know, potentially have a little neighborhood carbon sink where you would, you know, you'd take your carbon and all throw it down one hole and then make diamonds.
You know, compress the carbon until it turned to diamonds.
And every step of the way, pressure of some sort is going to be important in Supertrain.
It's really going to be about different kinds of pressure.
physical, emotional, but in the right place at the right time and eventually you're getting some kind of a fucking diamond.
It ends up being a still.
It ends up that every house has a little still and you throw everything into it.
And you're the revenuer.
The still cooks it down.
And at the end, you have some magnesium and you have a little bit of trace platinum and palladium.
And you collect those things until you have enough of that to sell on the open market.
Then you have oil and carbon and hopefully fresh rolls of toilet paper.
Well, for reasons that will be obvious soon and I will literally probably just delete my entire computer having said this.
Is it fair to say that the slurry and extrusion process and the production of oil inside of the consumer's home, is it fair to say that that's a little bit of a trap street?
Like that's how it will go at first and you go, holy shit, I've got some oil for the open market.
It just seems to me that in time, that's something SuperTrain is going to want slash need.
Yeah.
I see what you mean.
Are you – okay, here's the thing.
You're a man who is self-sustaining, right?
Well, I wish.
I wish I were more self-sustaining.
Don't you think you're moving closer rather than further?
I hope so.
I hope so.
I'm not saying hermetic per se.
It's my goal.
Would you like people to be self-sustaining or would you like them to literally become like pot people that you could extrude resources from?
Well, see, now you remember the R. Crumb comic strip where it draws the progression.
You have that on your wall.
I read that on your wall.
I have a version of it that was done by Tony Millionaire.
But the original R. Crumb, you know, he starts with a pastoral scene, and then they chop down the forest, and they build the railroads, and then it's a town, and then it's a city, and then in his estimation, it was this gross... The last panel was this gross...
sort of 70s reality where he clearly, his editorial voice was like, this is what it's come to.
But in the original panel, he did a couple of extra panels where he thought about the future and
And one of his future scapes was this classic 70s utopia where people were living in tree houses like the Swiss family Robinson.
And they were recycling and they were – and that is a version – that's one version that I know leftists carry around in their mind, which is that we're all going to have solar panels on the roofs of our houses and we're going to be selling electricity back to the grid.
Right.
We're not only going to be self-sufficient, but we're going to be selling it back to the grid.
As far as Supertrain's interest in this, I think it depends on who, after I'm gone, who the next CEO of Supertrain is.
Don't talk like that.
It happens.
We all pass to the great beyond.
And Supertrain, I think, while I am the font of Supertrain, I think we can trust that Supertrain wants everyone to become more self-sufficient.
But
Just as Supertrain reaches its kind of full potential.
Its destination, if you like.
That'll be right.
Well, you know, Supertrain has no one destination.
But it'll be just about the time that I am ready to move on to a more pastoral life.
And who takes over Supertrain after me?
The young people.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, Supertrain could go either way, and it could be that Supertrain needs all that oil.
It depends on what kind of green we're looking for, if I may say.
If you want the kind of green that's CFL light bulbs, Supertrain could go on this track.
If we want the kind of green that comes from literally stealing refined oil from an African-American family's home, that's a different kind of green.
That's a different green.
Conceivably.
And that is the case of the liberal imagination, right?
There are the people that want the green that is represented by the Prius, which is a kind of green that required that the old car was destroyed and this new car was manufactured and shipped to you from overseas in order that you save some...
almost unmeasurably small and a giant chinese boat run by cheap oil so that you could get it here and then put gas in it right you're perfectly to save the environment you're perfectly fine 15 year old honda civic that you could have repaired and driven for another 25 years you have now you've had crushed and recycled and you've bought a brand new thing that was shipped here in a coal burning uh super tanker and
Hey, could you guys toss some paper towels in that as long as you're coming over?
Where, you know, like the whole bilge of the thing is full of Malacan pirates.
Like cranking on big sweat wheels.
And it's like, oh, it's green.
This is green.
Like it happens all the time in my neighborhood where they're like, oh, this house that's 120 years old that is built with completely perfect old growth fur.
We're going to rip this down and we're going to staple together this...
This, you know, this thing made out of formaldehyde and like off gassing particle board.
And we're going to we're going to post a sign out front that says green construction and we're going to charge nine hundred thousand dollars a piece for these for these condos.
And that in people's imagination is some kind of net improvement because the new place has a more efficient air conditioning system.
And it's like whatever kind of green that is, Supertrain is going to eat that green.
It's going to graze.
Supertrain is going to turn all of those places back into their component.
Superfine oil, carbon, carbon slash diamonds.
And then all the base metals.
And there's not going to be any waste.
A little bit of Soylent Green.
My people use every part of the population.
You know, here's the thing.
The liberals that want to live in a treehouse, God bless you.
I think we have – all of us, all of us, these intelligent people like us at one time or another have all been liberals and have all wanted to live in a treehouse.
I just would like to point out – Treehouse were the bookcases.
Absolutely.
Sling and reveal secret passages.
All growth.
But the thing that's interesting to me, I'm not a historian, but it does strike me that a lot of these visions are really – they're about two blocks away from living on a collective in the Soviet Union.
And that is so not – it's not a kibbutz.
It's not going to be fun.
That's some Chuck Norris talk right there.
You think so?
Well – Am I doing that?
I don't know.
I'm just saying.
I mean, the thing is, what starts out as let's make potlucks together, you know, pretty soon you're out there.
You're working on a tractor, whether you like it or not.
It all depends on who's in charge.
And that's the that's the problem.
Exactly.
Right.
People are so excited to seed the responsibility.
uh, for so many things to somebody else, you know, it's somebody else's problem.
Somebody comes along with a train.
That's not the super train.
It's the unsuper train.
And they go, Oh, look, I'm an engineer and I'm green.
They're going to hook their fucking cars to that.
And just, and, and, and close their eyes and think of England and be led right down that, that, uh, that primrose path.
You need to be able to identify super train from imposter trains and,
Oh, from the false super train.
And I think we're developing a mechanism by which people will know the real super train.
When you feel pain but you're grateful for it, that's how you know super train's working.
Hear, hear.
You know, speaking of which, I was thinking about means of egress from your house.
Yeah.
Have you considered a zip line from your living room down to the...
Oof.
A, I have not.
And B, my daughter loves zip lines.
I think I could sell a zip line.
From your top story down to, I mean, the zip line could go conceivably all the way to the ocean.
I'm already seeing it.
I'm already seeing it.
I mean, I don't want to reveal too much.
Right.
Ever since we moved to San Mateo, we definitely don't live in San Francisco where we keep talking about.
But, you know, in San Francisco, you live in a house like ours.
You say you live on the second floor.
You really live on the third floor, right?
You're way up there.
You get the pancaking.
Because during the earthquake, it goes straight down because you've got a garage on the bottom.
You've got to watch that.
So we're technically on the third floor, a lot of walking.
But here's the thing.
We also have the park.
We've got telephone poles.
We've got some red-tailed hawks in the park that like to sit on the telephone pole.
I'm just saying, if I understand what you're saying –
Maybe we could disguise this as like a Comcast thing, but there could be an innocuous-looking cable, not really a rope even, a cable that would attach in such a way that we could slide down on a zip line from the top floor.
The problem is that the city inspectors are going to see that eventually.
They're going to say, what the hell is that?
What you need is a harpoon gun.
Huh.
If you had a harpoon gun that was attached to some cable, like a big reel of cable.
If they see a harpoon gun coming out of our window, they're not going to know what that is.
No, nobody.
They're going to think you're a collector.
They're going to think you're some weird, some weird San Francisco person.
He's got, he's got, he's got ladies shoes and chairs coming out of the side of his house.
And a big harpoon gun in the, on the top floor.
And you're like, that's right.
I'm just a collector of nautical memorabilia.
Or maybe I'm protesting whaling.
That's right.
It's exactly right.
Wait a minute.
Back it up.
I decommissioned this as an act of resistance.
I may have a harpoon gun on close inspection, but it appears to be a flag, a Tibetan flagpole.
If I put a Tibetan flag on a fucking harpoon outside my window, you know what I'm going to get?
I'm going to get the thanks of a nation under a dictator's thumb.
Every time that flag waves, it sends a prayer.
It says, hello, freedom.
And then when you need it, boom.
Boom.
I instruct my daughter on the safety of harpoon usage.
She knows the hand signals.
And after I've read this manual, I'm going to know how to like point at my eyes, make a harpoon face, hold up three fingers.
And she'll say, Wilco.
You're crouched in the living room.
Both of you painted in camouflage.
And you're like, it's time to initiate harpoon sequence one.
But you're saying all this... No, with my hands and my eyes and my camo.
I draw a little square on the carpet.
She fires the harpoon gun.
And then you zipline down the cable.
And who cares what happens?
I zipline my family to freedom, you know?
And, you know, when you first started talking about wanting to go to... Was it Tierra del Fuego in a broken car with your daughter?
Yeah.
I wasn't totally on board.
Is that right?
Well, I wasn't not on board.
But now I understand it.
Now, my kid's a tiger.
I mean, I could see fucking some shit up with her.
Absolutely.
We might want to start some kind of superhero team, the four of us.
I'm just saying.
It's like that scene at the end of Terminator.
Where she's getting gas at a gas station somewhere in Baja, California, and she sees the storm clouds on the horizon, and some little kid takes a picture of her looking wistfully that becomes the... It is the...
It becomes the plot element for the whole series of films.
But, you know, she's escaping.
She's headed south.
And we need to be prepared.
And the thing is, you need to be prepared to do that in a motor vehicle that does not have a complicated computer-driven ignition system.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You're not going to have computer tools on the road.
No, no, no.
You need a vintage Jeep.
A vintage Jeep with a really rough suspension.
And would we teach our daughters how to field strip that?
Absolutely.
The thing is, you and I are not going to be any use at all in terms of fixing this Jeep.
We may be arthritic, but we'll also be functioning at a higher level from a strategic standpoint.
We don't have time to field strip a Jeep.
Exactly.
We're going to be scanning the horizon with binoculars.
But we have the young ladies.
We raise them
Not only speaking a variety of languages, but also speaking the mechanical language of Jeep repair.
And we say, you know, keep this Jeep running, gals.
Keep these machine guns stripped and oiled.
But we do this with hand signals in our face.
That's right.
Now, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Has that ever been made into a film?
Well, actually, I don't care.
Because there's a new version of that.
It's going to be based on the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies.
It's the road to Tierra del Fuego.
It's a post-apocalyptic trip with singing.
And it's the four of us.
Maybe Dorothy L'Amour could be in it.
But I think it's you, me, and our daughters in a fucking Jeep making hand signals after the apocalypse.
Right.
Because, you know, I mean, let's be honest.
It's not a question of if, right?
It's a question of are you ready for when?
Are you ready?
You're going to be searching my fourth safe room, and I'm already going to be on the way to South America.
Now, when Canadian songwriter and songstress Kathleen Edwards was here in Seattle, one of the first things she said as we were driving around, she said, you know, it seems perfect here.
It's almost paradise.
What is the downside?
Tell me the real story.
What's the downside?
And I said, downside?
Honestly, volcanoes and earthquakes.
Yeah.
Like, you live in Toronto, you don't have any volcanoes, and you don't have any earthquakes, but here in the West, the great, you know, the, if you'll forgive me, the 800-pound hippopotamus in the room,
is that we're all living in the shadow of a very, very active and in geological time, like super young, active volcanic range.
And we're right on the water where the earthquakes create tsunamis.
It's basically a volcano earthquake tsunami that
I think you put the fear in that gal.
And I know you put the fear in me.
I have not given a thought, forgive me for saying, except for maybe making a plaster of Paris volcano when I was in college.
I haven't thought about volcanoes since Mount St.
Helens.
I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention.
And then you described something to me that I found chilling.
Yeah.
My penis seized up into my body because you described a volcano situation that I found completely chilling and implausible.
But the more you described it, the more I realized that we might be getting near some kind of a Cormac McCarthy situation.
Would you mind sharing with our listeners the volcano in a mountain scenario?
So you're talking about – you're talking about the – I'm talking about, oh, you didn't really know about the secret volcano that isn't really supposed to be there.
Yeah.
With the zit-like bolus coming out.
Because that was fucking chilling.
All these mountains here in the West that run from Vancouver all the way down to Mount Shasta and beyond, they are all...
Super-duper active volcanoes.
There's no... I mean, right now they all appear to be fairly dormant, but they're sitting as the Pacific plate subduces beneath the American continental plate.
They go down there and it turns into lava right under those mountains, and those mountains are just...
boiling underneath and they seem peaceful and birds are flying around them and they have lots of glaciers on them and their their national parks and people ski on them but really without very much warning there will be some warning but without very much warning without much extremely useful warning so you're not gonna get a by the way you know 30 days from now some shit might go down
Well, you know, one never knows.
There could be lots of... But I mean, we're all overdue for the super earthquake.
And the super earthquake is tied to all this volcanism.
And it is conceivable that the super earthquake will ignite a new round of...
volcanic activity in some of these massive mountains that are hovering just outside of the city limits, certainly here in Seattle, Mount Rainier, the largest mountain in North America, could erupt, and at which point those 10,000-year-old glaciers on its surface will instantly liquefy into a superheated 200-foot tall
like lahar of boiling mud and ash and... But didn't you describe something that was a cross between a zit and a portal from Asgard combined with a conflagration where there could be some kind of a herniated mountain that a volcano kind of finds its way out of and then explodes like a nail bomb?
Yeah.
Weren't you describing something where it gets – I want to imagine it.
You slice the top off a mountain and go, uh-oh, there's a volcano in here.
We weren't ready for this.
Well, yeah, you're doing a good job of describing it.
There's a volcano in every single one of those mountains.
Oh, Jesus, John.
Every single one.
What's it going to cost for us to get a Jeep?
Should we get a couple or three Jeeps and just kind of have them ready?
What we should be ready for is to commandeer a Jeep.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
And this is the thing where I... This is what Ted Bundy or Proteus would do.
You don't want to have the same vehicle.
You change your shirt, you put shoe polish in your hair, and there's still three Jeeps behind, right?
That's right.
That's exactly right.
So in that sense, I mean, knowing you and knowing me, I think my skill set...
It was going to handle the commandeering of Jeeps and, uh, and you know, uh, and I, I'm going to train my daughter to, to have that same skillset so that the two of us can work in concert to be, to be trading up, trading Jeeps.
We could always work in lightweight teams in pairs where we've learned the right hand signals and camouflage makeup to be able to – if you like using our scopes, we'd be able to communicate at a distance.
We could even have a staggering of Jeeps.
I think that's what it's called, like a murder of crows.
We could have a staggering of Jeeps and decoy Jeeps along the way so that we might have one.
You might jump in a hoopty that takes you somewhere.
We split up.
Maybe for the sake of argument, there are five or six other groups of people who look exactly like us.
You know, like the gangs.
There's a reason the gangs wear the white t-shirts and the hoodies, you know?
I think we'll be in a situation somewhere in Central America where we station you sitting, looking at a map, which may or may not have... Trap streets.
Trap streets.
And you'll be sitting on, you know, four or five crates of paper towels and toilet paper.
Will I be smoking?
Potentially you could be smoking a Cuban cigar, let's say.
And down the road comes a military convoy and they see you there and you get up kind of hopefully like waving your hands.
Hello, hello.
Help, I have all this toilet paper and paper towels, but no vehicle.
And they're going to be like lulled into a...
not into a false sense of security, but they're going to be so mesmerized by all this toilet paper that they don't have access to and paper towels.
Certainly not in two days.
In the jungle, that is going to look like a crate of diamonds to these guys.
They're going to be like, we hit the money here.
That's like cigarettes for rimming.
Exactly.
It's like, look at all that fucking toilet paper.
And then while you're holding up your map, pointing at the trap street going, where is this place?
Then I and my daughter...
Zip, zap, zip.
Zip line.
We come in on a zip line, throwing knives, throwing throwing stars, shuriken.
And then we have a new convoy, a new convoy full of whatever it is that they have.
I think decoys are powerful.
Howard Hughes did a lot of this with decoys.
In a lawsuit, his own airline sued him.
TWA sued him.
And they couldn't serve the subpoena.
They could not get to him no matter what.
Because he hired other guys with really long fingernails and long hair.
Well, there were lots of instances where he did have like those decoy cars and stuff like that.
I think that works better than most people think.
Also, I must say, if you have sealed yourself up in a room with Kleenex boxes and bottles for your own urine and you just simply refuse to open the door, when your lawyer of five years has never met you, I think you're moving in the right direction.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Even though, let's be honest, he is living underneath the paper cup with like 50 fucking drawings of locks, exactly the same size on them.
I feel like people in my town now, here in Seattle, they do not know, they realize that I have a lot of different cars.
They're not sure what car I'm going to be driving at any given moment.
And a scooter.
And a scooter.
And they're also aware that I changed my hair and facial hair configurations fairly regularly.
And I think what I'm trying to craft here, in Seattle at least, is the sense that any car could be being driven by me.
And so... It might have an Irish singing superstar in it.
You can tell Elvis Costello's story someday.
But you're driving all kinds of things or you're not driving lots of things.
We don't know.
That could be John Roderick for all we know.
That's right.
You pass a minivan full of nuns, could be John Roderick driving.
And so you have to be – when a Seattleite gets in their car and starts driving around the streets, they have to be vigilant.
They have to be aware.
That I could be in any vehicle at any time, and they could be in my way.
I could be headed to a location somewhere where I have not really read the map, and I'm on my way to an important meeting that I'm already 15 minutes late, but I purposely didn't actually figure out what the address was.
Not your fault.
And they need to keep moving and get out of my way.
And so I think there's a considerable...
portion of the population here in seattle that is beginning that that is beginning to dawn on they're they're they're figuring this out that's the extremely thin end of a very fucking wide wedge
Right?
So what you've done now is you have introduced – you know what you're doing?
You've got them thinking.
That's right.
People don't like to think, John, as you know.
They don't just get in their cars, turn on the radio, and drive absentmindedly to work anymore.
That's right.
They are thinking, is John Roderick in a car?
They're not going to put on glass houses and start juking around.
They're going to be thinking twice about whether John would even want me to be listening to glass houses, and you know what?
I already know the answer.
And some of them are starting, when they leave the house, they bring their infrared glasses.
They bring a week's supply of food.
They always have a bag packed, an egress bag.
Maybe a jar of slurry.
They're getting into those cars prepared for any eventuality, and that is ultimately Super Train's goal.
Short-term goal.
Short-term goal.
Not long-term goal.
Short-term goal.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you certainly have hopes for the legacy, but you're saying, like anyone, even like the late, great Howard Hughes, you're not going to be there forever.
You're not going to be in the desert in with literally audibly clacking toenails forever.
People come up to me.
They come up to me at shows.
They come up to me at public events, and they say...
Very confidentially, they lean in and say, how do I make sure that I'm on SuperTrain?
How do I guarantee myself a birth on SuperTrain?
And my answer is usually, you are already doing a good job.
Wow.
Is it the cognizance or the being deferential, being respectful?
What is it that has them a theoretical seat on a theoretical non-existent evil train?
All these things.
All these things and more.
If someone swaggers up to me and says, I'm ready for super train.
You know, my suspicion is... Are you tempted to punch him in the nose a little bit?
No, I give him that look, which is, you're not ready for Supertrain.
Thinking you are ready for Supertrain is to be not ready for Supertrain.
Oh, you're saying that actually, more than an acceptance, really seeking out a certain kind of imbalance and distrust of oneself...
You're saying that's the beginning of understanding what your place in super train will be.
Yeah.
You don't, well, you don't walk out of the house saying I have everything I need.
You walk out of the house saying, what do I not have?
I hope to Christ.
I have everything.
That's right.
I hope to Christ.
I have everything I need.
That's the best you can do.
That is the best you can do.
That is going to be the worst propaganda poster I've ever seen.
It's going to be you sitting proudly on the prow of a giant menacing train and a child saying, I hope to Christ I have everything I'll need.
I hope to Christ I brought everything I need.
Is this enough toilet paper?
Slurry.
I got to pee.
I don't know if we got a stopping point there, but that was pretty fucking funny.
Gumming up my game.
Special ops.
You know, we can't always give them a bell.
Sometimes it just has to stop.
Ha ha!
Bell!
Fuck that.